Latest Website Design and Online Marketing News
Website design and online marketing are constantly changing. The search engines are forever updating the way they rate websites, new ways of building websites appear, new software comes out, new threats arrive. It can all be a bit much to not only keep up with, but also to understand how it will affect your business.
Our news page breaks down this overwhelming stream of information to focus on what's important to you. We'll sift and translate it so you can quickly grasp what's really happening.
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Click throughs on mobile devices are increasing for pay per click advertisingpublished 13 Feb 2013
by Bob Grant
A new report has been released by Marin Software discussing trends in the pay per click (PPC) advertising market. Whilst the overall amount spent on this type of marketing is still increasing the most interesting fact from the report is how the proportion spent on mobile devices is expanding.
If you're not familiar with PPC advertising, the best place to see it in action is when you do a search on Google.
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Google's Disavow Tool Goes Livepublished 24 Oct 2012
by Bob Grant
On 17 October Google announced the release of its Disavow Link Tool in its Webmaster Tools area. In essence this new tool allows you to distance yourself from any link pointing to your website that you don't like.
Click here to see the new tool
Google's big updates over the last year and a half have all been aimed at improving the quality of the search engine results. This meant big changes to the way we do search engine optimisation.
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No SEO Boost for Exact Match Domainspublished 19 Oct 2012
by Bob Grant
Exact match domain names have long been seen as a free ticket to better search engine rankings. If you wanted to be found for the search phrase "green widgets in Northampton" then why not set up a website on the domain name green-widgets-in-northampton.co.uk? It's always been debatable about how much of a boost this gave your website, but it did seem to work for longer, less competitive phrases (long tail searches).
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Top Tips to Beat the Penguin - Google Penguin 2.0 Updatepublished 6 Sep 2012
by Bob Grant
Everyone in the SEO world is bracing themselves for the next Google update, Penguin 2.0. Matt Cutts, the official Google news source, has described this as an "update" as opposed to a "refresh". This implies that Google will be changing the way it ranks your websites, adjusting which factors are most important and how it analyses your website's presence.
Google uses a complex piece of software referred to as the Google Algorithm.
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How to Comply With the UK Cookie Lawpublished 19 Jul 2012
by Bob Grant
There's been a lot of confusion over the UK cookie law. What does it mean? What do you have to do? Which cookies are okay and which cookies aren't? The government didn't help things by being very vague and not actually saying what you had to do. I wrote an article on this a couple of months ago based on the International Chamber of Commerce report which was widely regarded as the best advice at the time.
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The Cookie Law - Are You Legal?published 14 May 2012
by Bob Grant
Note : We've updated our advice since writing this article - UK Cookie Law Advice.
The Cookie Law (Regulation 6 of the UK Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 to give it its more formal title) is going to be enforced from the end of this month (May 2012). If you're based in the UK and run a website you're going to have to pay attention.
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Ignore Mobile Website Design at Your Perilpublished 5 Mar 2012
Yet another report has just been released showing that mobile usage is sky-rocketing. This time the research is by Google and Ipsos. They've been looking at the percentages of people using smartphones and how their use fits into the overall buying process. The results are clear indication that if you are selling a product or service online you need to get your message across clearly on smartphones and tablets.
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Is your website compatible with all browsers and mobile devicespublished 4 Feb 2012
A couple of years ago my job was getting easier. The older, smaller screen sizes had all but disappeared and browsers, the program you use to view the web, were becoming more and more compatible with each other. All the heartache of trying to make sure that everyone looking at your website could see it properly was fading away.
But then Apple launched the iPhone which spawned a whole new wave of mobile devices with piddly little screens and brand-new browser problems.
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![[Google] Single Page Websites Are Out](uploads/article1731/thumbbig.jpg)
[Google] Single Page Websites Are Outpublished 6 Dec 2011
In its latest round of updates Google has been targeting parked domains and scraper sites. It also confirmed that it will now be publishing lists of updates every month to keep people up to date with the latest developments in its search engine algorithms.
Google has always been striving to filter out websites with little value to searchers. This update has specifically targeted what it called parked domains; basically single page websites.
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More Google Updates - Will Your Website Suffer?published 16 Nov 2011
Google made a major change to the way they rank websites in the search engine results back in March 2011. This was generally referred to as the Google Panda update. Since then they've been further tweaking their algorithms until we are now at Panda 2.5.
The overall emphasis of these updates has been to improve Google search results by promoting authoritative websites.
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