New SEO Client: Ketech

Over the past few weeks I have been working on the SEO for a company called KeTech.

KeTech offer a very large and wide selection of services. Established in 1998 to provide communication systems consultancy, design, engineering, software development and maintenance services to the transport sector. Over the past few years they have expanded into several different markets by taking over several firms. This has led to the creation of several new KeTech divisions: KeTech Systems, KeTech Defence and KeTech Detection.

Recently the company have launched a new website and we will be optimising certain areas of their site which represent the main services that they wish to promote.

The KeTech site is aimed towards a fairly specific niche business to business market. This can throw up some challenges and can mean that the website will be optimised for quite “low traffic” keywords.

Some of the keyword research for the site took longer than expected. For example, KeTech were keen to promote their vehicle tracking and wireless communication applications. A keyword such as “wireless communication” receives a high number of daily searches, but it is quite general – there are lots of different results when you search it in Google. For many of their keywords we had to come up with longer tailed keywords or synonyms of popular keywords. Examples of keywords we are optimising the site for include radio communication systems, explosive detection, baggage x ray, remote telemetry, retail telecommunications, and transportation information systems.

The website was built using our Web Manager 1 CMS and contains about 80 pages. I was initially surprised at how big the site was when I started working on it. It is taking quite a long time to go through the pages adding in links and keywords in appropriate places.

After working on the site for just a small amount of time we are starting to see some very encouraging results in the search engines. This trend will continue as we build link in links and develop the content on the site.

Kenwood Energysense JK450

I bought a new Kenwood Energysense JK450 kettle today! Big news eh? I have made a video and put it on YouTube as an experiment to see how high the video would rank if you search for Kenwood Energysense JK450. The video was also a good chance to try out using iMovie - it’s pretty easy to work out how to use, which was nice.

I uploaded the video about 5 minutes ago and it is already ranking in about the 13th position. I will build a few links to the video and have a look to see what happens.

Please feel free to rate the video!

Using Panoramio for SEO

Have you ever noticed that when you look at Google Maps there are often photos added to the map? These photos are from a website called Panoramio - it is very similar to flickr, allowing you to upload photos, give them a description and then tag them with locations on the Google Map.

I have just looked at the Google Map for Nottingham and this screen shot shows a small snippet of the city centre:

Clicking on the images will open up a slightly larger thumbnail which displays the photo title. It can be a great way of exploring cities and also sharing photos with friends and family.

This month I am going to upload pictures for our SEO clients. Today I have added some images taken at the Paintball Jungle, a Paintball Centre in Nottingham. The company have lots of pictures of people having fun at their Mansfield Paintball venue.







The Panoramio site is a great way to share photos and also hopefully generate some extra traffic to their website.

Lost in the Jungle!

This morning I have spent some time working on one of our clients sites, the Adrenalin Jungle website. The company have three websites in total: the Adrenalin Jungle, Paintball Jungle and the Corporate Jungle – plus the Jungle Blog too!

Over the last few months there seems to have been a big rise in the number of sites who are competing for some of the Adrenalin Jungle keywords. For example, if you search in Yahoo for “Paintball Nottingham” (a keyword that they have ranked number 1 for the past year) the Paintball Jungle site is currently ranked in around 5th position behind several sites which have appeared. This must show the advantage that can be achieved by using keyword rich URLs

The Adrenalin Jungle site uses our Web Manager 2 CMS. The system makes it easy for their staff to update and make changes to the site. It can cause some problems though - when pages are deleted or changed some of the links on the pages will no longer work. This can have an effect on the SEO for the site, one month the rankings for the Go Karting Nottingham fell drastically, and this was after the page had been renamed! Today I went through the site ensuring all of their keyword text links go through to the correct pages. I have also updated the xml sitemaps, to make sure that any new pages are included.

The Corporate Entertainment website has only been around for a few months. They are currently finalising and adding content to some of the pages, something that can often take much longer than clients anticipate! We have started the SEO work on the site, optimising for keyword such as teambuilding, team building activities, outdoor team building and corporate entertainment midlands.

If you think that your online presence could be improved, or if you have any questions about search engine optimisation, web design or pay per click management then give Metafocus a call on 0115 947 0011

Our Progress with Bournes Debt Solutions

One of our clients came into the office yesterday to arrange a meeting about expanding her website. The website is for a company who specialise in debt solutions for people who need help to rectify their financial problems.

Bournes Debt Solutions can help with any debt related issues such as

Debt Management Plans
Debt Solutions
Charging Orders
Basic Bank Accounts
Consumer Credit Agreements
County Court Judgments

The site has been live for nearly a year and the SEO and online marketing is really starting to have a positive effect. The debt solutions market is very competitive with lots of other sites competing for the same keywords.

Since working on the site our approach has been revised several times. The keywords for which we optimise the site have been reviewed and also the methods used to promote the site have also changed.

In the past we used PPC to promote Bournes and their services. The competition for the keywords was high, with some of the keywords costing upwards of £10 per click! The PPC was effective at driving traffic to the site, but the number of real enquiries was quite low and it was very expensive!

Optimising the site for general terms such as bankruptcy or credit advice is not a realistic approach. At the moment, the domain and site are still quite young so we are currently focussing on a more localised and targeted approach by optimising for keywords such as debt advice Nottingham and charging orders nottingham. In the future, as the site matures and the number of relevant inbound links increase, the site will be able to compete alongside some of the bigger sites in the industry.

The meeting next week will be a good opportunity to review the work on the site and plan for the next six months.

Global Online Marketing

Metafocus is once again a global online marketing company!

Well, nothing much has changed except that I have put up another sign on the building that had been pulled down last weekend.

This time the sign has been put up slightly higher and with bigger screws.. Hopefully the current sign will last a bit longer than the last one – will keep you posted after the weekend!

No Index means No Index!

I made a bit of a mistake the other day. The website for my club night Audiophile has recently stopped being indexed in the search engines.

I have been scratching my head over it for a few weeks and thought that it might be something to do with the wordpress theme, or maybe a problem with the hosting (it's hosted with Fasthosts - say no more!). Finally the penny dropped and I thought I’d better check the code to see if there was some sort of no index tag in there. Bingo!

< meta name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' />

The no index metatag gives webmasters control over their sites, allowing them to avoid search engines automatically indexing sites or certain webpages. Some things just shouldn’t end up in Google - search for “businessplan.xls” or “expenses.xls” and you’ll see what I mean!

Even though we do most of our online Audiophile promotion through music forums, facebook and myspace it still helps to make sure that our website is indexed in the search engines!

Nice one Broomy..

This afternoon while I was working on the Four Corners website the unthinkable happened…

I heard the noise from the kitchen while Andy was making the drinks, but I never imagined that it was my favourite mug that had gone crashing to the floor.



His grinning face did very little to make me feel any better.

Making Money cont..

I’ve reached the end of my July deadline and I think I’ve come up with a few ideas that I can start to put into place during August.

Over the last month I have registered two new domains and I am currently working on the designs for two new websites.

One of these sites is Beaver Castle. The main source of income from this site will be from Adsense and potentially other advertising. I’m confident about making a steady income from this, the holding page that is on the site at the moment is receiving quite good levels of traffic already from people mis-spelling Belvoir Castle.

My other domain that I have registered is turnoffyourlights.co.uk. The plans for this site are a little more complex than with the Beaver Castle site, but I will let you know as soon as I feel happy with them :)

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Propeller has had a facelift

It's all kicking off this week.. It seems like lots of sites are revamping for the summer.

Facebook is at it..

Metafocus have launched our new Global Internet Marketing site..

and now Propeller has done it too..

One thing I noticed though, the new Propeller logo looks very similar to the Allan & Heath X:ONE logo



One of these logos is for a world class dj mixer, the other one is for a website that isnt quite as good as digg :)

Making Money on the Internet.. Update

Well.. it's been a few weeks and I am fast approaching my deadline of the end of July to come up with some big suggestions.

I have managed a few ideas. I have registered a new domain for a Beaver Castle site I am going to create. At the moment I am working on the site design and also writing some content.

The Beaver Castle domain was only registered a few weeks ago, but it is already ranking quite well in Google for its main keyword. It's quite suprising, the site is ranked in the top 10 Google results in the space of a few days, with no inbound links (the above link is the first one!) and very little content on the page - just shows the importance that the domain name plays in a website's SEO.

Overall its been a fairly productive few weeks. I have got a few more ideas in the pipeline which will hopefully work out quite well.. On a plus note, I have also made £7 selling bits and bobs on ebay :)

SEO at Metafocus

One of the biggest sites which we have built recently at Metafocus is an ecommerce site selling male grooming products called Aspetto.

The site has been live for around six months and has presented lots of interesting challenges for us with the online marketing and SEO side of things.

At Metafocus we have a wide range of consumer and business facing websites. Speaking honestly, I find it more interesting working on the consumer facing sites! I think it’s more appealing thinking about “birthday gifts for men” and “mens skincare” than say something like “potassium permanganate”.

I often find it a bit strange that while I was studying marketing at Leicester University, most of the course content related to business to consumer (B2C) rather than business to business marketing. I think that this might be why working on consumer sites feels more familiar.

When we devise an online marketing plan for a site like Aspetto there is always a big selection of sites that we can incorporate and use to our advantage. We try to use lots of different social networking sites, blogs and forums to help attract visitors to the site. This makes it more interesting for us, and also by casting our nets a little further we should also get better results.

If you think that your business needs help to grow online, or if you are interested in search engine optimisation give Metafocus a call on 0115 947 0011.

Hanging in there with SEO!

At Metafocus we have got a fairly wide selection of clients who are enrolled on our monthly SEO program. A full list of our clients can be found on our links page. They range from small hotels in Newark, luxury bed and breakfasts, to haulage firms and contemporary architects.

As you can imagine, with such a wide range of clients comes an extremely long list of keywords. Good keywords should be relevant to the site and also be receiving traffic in the search engines. What’s the point in optimising sites for words that people aren’t typing into Google? Contrary to what some SEO companies may say, there is no point!

For some sites there is no choice but to optimise for fairly competitive keywords. There are many reasons for this, for example often clients will insist that their sites are optimised for specific keywords, or trying to optimise the site for more long tailed or localised keywords may result in very low levels of web traffic.

One of our clients is a group of strategic management consultants in Nottingham called Watson Sessions. Their domain is quite new with having only been registered in February. They do currently rank well for localised keywords such as “marketing consultants Nottingham” and “Business consultants Nottingham” but for other less specific keywords such as “strategic management consultants”, “strategy consultants” and “business consultancy” the site does not currently rank so well.

Over time as we build more links into the site, promote the site online, and as the domain matures the website will climb up the search positions for these important keywords. At the moment it feels like we are putting a lot of effort into promoting the site online for very low rewards. We just need to be confident with what we are doing – one day the site will rank well for “executive coaching and mentoring” and “independent business advice”.