This algorithm update is designed to target sites, which are using webspam tactics such as keyword stuffing and unusual link patterns.

This change will dramatically decrease the rankings of sites breaking Google’s guidelines. The update represents another step in Google’s efforts to reduce webspam and promote high quality content.

Google deems webspam to be pages that are trying to gain better rankings through:

• Keyword stuffing
• Link schemes
• Cloaking, sneaky redirects or doorway pages
• Purposeful duplicate content

These black or grey hat techniques are nothing new; Google has been targeting these types of webspam for the last ten years. This update is more of a refresh of Google’s spam detection methods.

Google says this new update will impact about 3.1% of queries in English.

This algorithm update will by no means have an impact on any campaigns we are working on since we are not using any webspam tactics to manipulate the search engine rankings. We are only using white hat SEO methods to promote and rank sites. We aim to focus on creating high quality sites that give a good user experience and employ white hat SEO methods instead of engaging in aggressive webspam tactics.

If you need any help with this please do not hesitate to give us a call on: 01793 238 697.

Unlike Facebook there was no warning before this update otherwise we would have made sure to prepare you for these changes.

Here are some tips on getting your Google+ page representing your company professionally:

Unfortunately the dimensions for the profile page and the cover photo are not the same as Facebook so although you can still use these images for both they will need to be tweaked slightly for the best look.

1) Profile Picture

• The profile picture has increased slightly from 202px by 192px to a more even 250px by 250px. Although this will stretch to fill the box we recommend that you redesign this to fit.
• To change this image just hover over the area that contains your profile picture and click on the small banner that appears at the bottom of the image that says “Change profile photo”. Select Upload and either search through your folders or drag and drop the image that you want to replace it with.
• It would be best to check how the thumbnail of this image looks next to a post once uploaded, but there shouldn’t be a problem as the thumbnail is proportionate to the profile image size.

We have started working with Celtic Sheepskin, based in Cornwall; they are one of the largest suppliers of sheepskin footwear and ethical clothing in the UK. Celtic Sheepskin have employed our search engine optimisation services and we are very excited to be working with such a successful and established brand.

We are really pleased that Aerial Camera Systems (ACS) have also engaged our SEO services. ACS, based in Surrey, have provided specialist camera solutions since 1979 and have worked for a number of big events, TV shows and so on – we are very happy to be working with such an interesting business.

And finally Environmental Media Solutions (EMS) have employed us to design a new website for them and provide e-commerce consultancy. Based in Bristol, EMS specialise in recycling of recordable media and electronic equipment. We are thrilled to welcome on this new project for another fascinating business.

We are really looking forward to working with these great new clients!

If you are interested in our online marketing services please give our friendly team a call on: 01793 238697.

What is the MSN/Yahoo Search Alliance?

In a nutshell, Bings’ search engine is now powering Yahoo results for both natural and sponsored listings.  Any pay per click advertising you were running on yahoo needs to be transferred to an Microsoft Adcenter account (Yahoo supply a transition tool to do this.)

What Impact Will the Alliance Have?

It’s thought that the impact in the UK will be very small, as it is only 7% of the search market compared to a 30% share in the US. It’s mostly Yahoo PPC advertisers that will notice a difference with the loss of under 5p keywords.  Hopefully the benefits, which some of our clients are already experiencing, will continue and grow over the coming months.

Here are some handy tips to help you with the change.

On the 30^th March 2012 Facebook will be rolling out an automatic update to your business pages, it will be changed whether you are ready or not! It could end up looking slightly bare so we recommend that you get it changed ASAP!

Until 30^th March you can preview the page and publish it when you are ready, a box will come up on your existing page to do this and you can change back at any point until 30^th March.

	How your Facebook page will look at the moment
	How your Facebook page could look if you don’t make these changes

Luckily it won’t take too much effort for you to fill in the gaps that the automatic update will bring, the three main sections that need to be changed are:

1)    Profile Picture

• Your profile picture will change from the long side image to a much smaller box (180×180) so we would recommend a new one.
• If you do need to change it hover over the current profile picture and click edit profile picture.
• Once you have uploaded your new image just check what your thumbnail (smaller picture that appears next to each post that you make) looks like, if this needs editing go to edit profile picture again.

2)    Cover Photo

• The next important step is the cover photo; there is a large space available to make your page look professional:
• You must be careful on here however, as you CANNOT put any call to actions on it, any offers or contact details.
• It must be a minimum of 399 pixels and no bigger than 850×315 pixels
• Click the button at the top of the page Add Cover and follow the instructions on there

3)    Favourites

• The final stage is to sort out your favourites section (the boxes and information under your new cover picture)
• First of all, check the text – this is automatically taken from your “about” page so make sure this information is now relevant to your business.
• There are then the four image boxes which are your featured favourites – this basically replaces the left hand side column on the old version. You can change this section; the only boxes, which have to stay, are the ‘photos’ and the ‘like’ although this one can be moved around.
• So choose the items you want to be displayed, you can move them by clicking on the down arrow next to the favourites bar then hover over the boxes you want to change and click the pencil button.
• You can change the images on these – they need to be 111×74 pixels

Additional items you can now change:

4)    Milestones

• This section allows you to show the history of your business.
• We would recommend adding in when the company was founded and any other important moments for your business

5)    Highlight/Pinned Posts

• We particularly like this option it basically allows you to make the posts, which you want to show off the most, as your favourites and show up larger.
• This is really easy to do simply go through your previous posts and click the star icon to make these more prominent on your page.
• For posts that are new or important you can “pin” it at the top of your timeline – this time click the pencil icon and click pin to top

And you should end up with something that looks like this!

If you need any help in designing your cover image or getting this set up properly do not hesitate to give us a call on: 01793 238697

This month our very own Al Keck featured in Direct Commerce magazine with a website review of www.modelzone.co.uk. Please see here: A Model Example to read the article.

Our first welcome is to Chiswick Fireplaces, the name gives this one away really, they are fireplace specialists based in Chiswick in London and they have employed our link building services.

Lisa Gill Photography were the next to jump of board with us, they are a wedding and portrait expert photographer based in Buckinghamshire and have taken on our link building services.

And finally, we are thrilled that Urns UK have decided to work with us. Based in Potters Bar, Urns UK sell unique and stylish Urns for your loved ones (they even have specialist pets urns!). We are taking over their PPC management and are looking forward to working with such a unique company.

We are delighted to welcome another selection of great companies to us here at toinfinity, 2012 is shaping up to be a busy year for us!

What do we have to look forward to this year within Email Marketing?

Looking back at how the beginning of this year has gone, and how the entirety of 2011 turned out, we can safely assume that the use of mobile devices to view email (as well as general browsing) will only increase. The amount of people shopping online will also be on the up as Internet shopping becomes consistently cheaper than your average high street. Also, hopefully this year will see an increase in compatibility for HTML within emails.

What we found quite exciting here at toinfinity, was the news that Hotmail now supports HTML5 video within emails along with a few other HTML5 tags. Unfortunately other email clients don’t currently support video, so this isn’t overly useful at present. What this does mean is that Microsoft are pushing forward with their email clients, and with the release of Office 15 next year, a new Outlook could hit the shelves, hopefully with a bit more compatibility for HTML emails.

As marketers, in an ideal world we would love to see this put the cogs in motion to bring a new line of updates for all of our favourite email clients during the course of 2012. Who knows come mid 2012 we could be sending fully animated emails that open without restriction and are powered entirely by HTML5. This of course is unlikely with privacy issues still very much in the spot light but we can only hope for definite improvements for email marketing this year, and with it an increase in positive response from current and future clients towards email marketing.

In other tech news…

Towards the end of 2011 Adobe announced that it would no longer be developing its Flash player for mobile devices due to the fact that HTML5 is now supported on all major mobile devices, this is because it is now a more viable source of creating and utilising content across multiple platforms.

How does this relate to our previous topic you may ask? Well as HTML5 becomes more widely catered for we will hopefully start to see more email clients, web browsers and mobile devices adhering to new standards as well as old.

There hasn’t been a better reason to refurbish old code in over 10 years so here’s hoping this year works well for everyone’s inboxes and browsers.

We have had an excellent start to 2012 here at toinfinity with some fantastic new client wins.

We are very pleased to welcome on board Monuskin, Fresh Tracks Canada, Heart Gallery, and RS Sailing.

Monuskin have taken us on to act as their full e-consultancy team, featuring pay per click management, full search engine optimisation services, email marketing and overall e-consultancy. Monuskin produce natural beauty products and we are looking forward to helping them grow their B2C market over the coming months.

Fresh Tracks Canada are a travel company offering specialist Canadian holidays and adventures. Fresh Tracks have employed our search engine optimisation services and we are excited to be working with such an interesting company especially to be taking toinfinity global!

Heart Gallery, based in Lichfield, sell high quality limited edition prints, sculptures and original artwork. They have taken on our SEO services and we are really pleased to welcome them on board.

RS Sailing based near Southampton sell a wide range of sailing boats and have enlisted our pay per click services initially with the potential of more further on which we are thrilled about.

As always we are very happy to welcome new clients and hope that this bodes well for a successful 2012 for toinfinity.

KPI’s or Key Performance Indicators are a set of performance statistics (in this case we are talking about website/online campaign statistics) specific to your business. They offer an insight into how you are performing against your organisations goals.

Why do you need KPI’s? Without some sort of regular baseline of information, you will find it difficult to understand the impact of your marketing campaigns, form strategies or move your business forward.

Which KPI’s should I use?  This is not a straightforward question to answer, as every organisation has its own set of objectives and therefore KPI’s will differ. What they should be is useful. For each measurement, does it highlight a success or failure against your organisational objectives? Can you use that information to identify opportunities?

One of the most common KPI’s you see is visits, but really what does that data tell you? You had more visits last month than this month but less that three months ago?  More useful KPIs could include:

• Conversion rate – whether this is goal conversion or sales conversion, this KPI focuses on outcomes and therefore organisational goals (and probably the reason your website exists.)
• Average Order Value (AOV) – If you have an ecommerce website, this is a key KPI as there are a number of marketing strategies which impact your basket value.  For example, if your AOV is £45 and the boss suggests a free delivery offer, rather than offer free delivery for all orders over £40, you could set free delivery at all orders over £50 to increase AOV.  This is also a good metric for testing cross-sells on the basket pages.
• Return on Investment (ROI) – This needs to measured several times over a period of a campaign, as sales can be generated weeks after a campaign has finished. True ROI should include all your costs eg. Agency fees as well as set up/send/advertising fees.
• Vistor Loyalty & Recency – an excellent metric for content websites where you need to measure engagement ie. How frequently do people visit your site and within what period.
• Task Completion – different from conversion rate because this relies on an exit survey rather than analytics.  If only 3-4% of your visitors ever buy or contact you on your website, why don’t the rest of them? By using a simple exit survey (in the form of a pop up), you can gain useful information on why people didn’t buy from you and use that information to improve your site/offering.
• Search Exit Rate – the usefulness of this KPI varies depending on your customer eg. More technically adept users tend to use keyword search over other navigation methods. This would also be something to follow up with an exit survey.

If your organisation relies heavily on social media, there is a whole other set of KPI’s you should be using to measure the effectiveness of this online medium, that however is a whole other blog post!

If you would like more information on putting KPIs in place for your organisation, why not get in touch with us now.