ALCANDER NEWSLETTER

16 December 2003

 Issue 3

NEWS ITEM IN BRIEF

LINKS FOR MORE INFORMATION

Two of the industries' top leaders, Robin Nobles and John Alexander are coming to London in February 2004.

10-12-03

read about this story

Also see 'Internet Marketing Tips-Web Promotion' below.

Meta Search Engines are back!

4-12-03

Been Gazumped by Google? Trying to make sense of the Florida Update!

25-11-03

Google IPO and Google's future

25-11-03

Google changes anger web businesses

4-12-03

Google Apologises for Update Woes!

13-12-03

WEB PROMOTION

More on Internet Marketing Experts Robin Nobles and John Alexander

As announced in Alcander Newsletter issue 2 (26/11/03), Industry leaders Robin Nobles and John Alexander are visiting the UK in February 2004 to run their successful workshops.

Here is some information on these two gurus of the Internet Marketing world.

ROBIN NOBLES

Robin Nobles has taught over a thousand students during the past several years in her search engine positioning courses (held online and onsite). She is Director of Training for the Academy of Web Specialists and author of the best selling book Maximise Website Traffic: Build Web Site Traffic Fast and Free by Optimizing Search Engine Placement as well as Web Site Analysis and Reporting for E-commerce.

JOHN ALEXANDER

John Alexander is a Professional SEO who started his own independent Internet consulting business in 1996. He has spent a considerable time studying search engines and uses this knowledge to develop search engine strategies that deliver results. John has been teaching these strategies to people all around the world since 1998.

CUSTOMER RETENTION

In each issue, we will review either a) new ways to keep your customers interested once they've found your website or b) ways you can collect information about your website visitors - information you can use to devise new content for your site to help retain different kinds of visitors.

How a Web Callback System can help Communication with your Customers

To succeed in business, you need to communicate effectively. The most efficient way of keeping customers interested is to talk to them. You can encourage them to contact you by going one step beyond simply having your telephone number published on your website. By including a facility whereby customers simply click on a button to request a callback, is much more persuasive and makes it easy for them. Furthermore, the textcall web callback system, allows you to be reached reliably whether you are are in the office or not.

In our first 7 issues, we look at the 7 BIG mistakes in web design. We've now reached the third in this series, and we are going to look at....

The Lust for more Traffic

Because information on how to increase website traffic is so readily available, there is a tendency to latch on to every tip we come across, constantly redesigning our pages, restructuring and changing the focus.

This is a mistake, not only because so many of these "tips" are simply misinformation, but also because every time we refocus we start all over with the search engines.

A better policy is to make small incremental adjustments to stay in synch with the search engines. A Search Engine Optimisation specialist is best equipped to do this for you. As well as providing an up-front service to improve your rankings, they normally provide a follow-up maintenance service which continues over a period of time.
Alcander's web promotion service operates in this manner.

Ignore organisations who make promises such as "we will submit your site to over thousands of search engines", but go after targeted traffic instead. It is far better to concentrate on the handful of major search engines for a few niche keywords and phrases, than to go after traffic at all costs. There are only a few hundred significant search engines in the world, and (out of those) it normally only makes sense to target the few relevant for your market. Alcander concentrates on about sixteen for websites hosted in the UK (without necessarily limiting the market to the U.K. only).

If we ran a web award scheme, we would give out awards to the following web sites. We have placed each "award" in one of 8 categories. Who knows, one day we may run an official awards website. One way of getting ideas for compelling websites is to look for inspiration from other compelling websites. The categories below are subject to change.

Arts & Entertainment :

www.tattoomovie.co.uk

Not for the faint-hearted. The darkest chill-thriller since "Seven".

Humour

www.riber.net

Riber: Site with political, satirical cartoons, and caricatures by Riber Hansson.

Business/Commercial:

www.norville.co.uk/

Norville is a modern one-stop shop of the best new innovations in lenses, eyewear and optical workshop machinery.

Science and Technology:

Human Body Adventure

<Link http://www.vilenski.org/science/humanbody/hb_intro.html now invalid (requires authorisation login) - Webmaster 22/04/04>

Creativity :

www.e-merce.co.uk/

Innovative website design

Webmasters Resources :

Games4Traffic

An excellent opportunity for the small as well as the large web site owner to increase their daily traffic levels, customer database, and add great content to their website!

E-commerce :

www.bluenile.com

Shop for diamonds and fine jewelry

Educational :

www.rainforestlive.org.uk

An educational, ecological site - for children and teachers.

Why restrict your searching to Google? Each fort-night we look at other ways of searching the Internet.

SEARCHING FOR IMAGES

Google's own image search is very efficient and suits most purposes. Other useful resources include : www.clipart.com (they claim they are the largest subscription selection of clipart, photos, fonts, animations and sounds on the web); altavista's image search (their claim is that they are the largest image search on the web); ditto.com (retrieves images that have been screened); picsearch.com (family friendly picture search that utilises patent-pending indexing algorithms) and gograph.com (search for animated gifs, photos, icons, clip art, wallpapers and interfaces).

Read about terms or definitions before we get around to putting them in our knowledgebase (www.alcander.co.uk/knowbase.php)

Mousetrapping : Browser-based trickery with the intention to keep a visitor captive at a site. Common examples include the disabling of the "Back" button and generating repeated pop-up windows.

To stop the repeated pop-up windows, the user is advised to press "Ctrl+Alt+Del" and end the browser session (task). There are software programs available which will intervene and help prevent this problem.