1.     Make your headline emotive: Use your web design to pull on the heart strings. Give your title a message that matches your customer’s desires, hopes or aspirations.

2. Design your web site to allow for a real time 2 way conversation: Place live chat widgets on lots of pages – critically, right beside the Call To Action.  Be able to answer queries from someone unsure about a decision to purchase. (more…)

Cut through the  SEO confusion with our simple process to find those elusive key words that work for your business. Sometimes it’s easy to overlook the obvious!

1. Make sure you Register Your Own Brand Names

Always be sure you rank for your brand name. This is the first goal of search engine optimization. Search for it and establish where exactly you rank on the web.  In the event that you don’t feature for your own brand then make it a priority. It’s usually an easy step and you may even be there already. Force out any competitors ranking on page one with your brand, you want to own this position. Search engine algorithms won’t allow brand ownership of the full first page of results, they generally will only show 2 – 4 results from the same domain on a page.

2. Get Keyword Suggestions

Add your web address, any relevant keywords plus competitor URLs into a keyword search tool and download a list of ideas for recommended keywords. Google’s Keyword Tool is free and is commonly used. When you use a suggestion tool to add keywords that are relevant to your brand, ensure that you include a selection of header terms, middle ranking terms and long-tail keywords.

• Head terms get 1,000+ monthly searches – generic
• Mid-terms get  between 100 to 1,000 monthly searches – more tailored
• Long-tail keywords usually get 100 monthly searches – quite specific and target related

3. Beat Your Competitors at Search Engine Optimization

Find out which keywords your competitors have selected by inserting their main URL address to the keyword suggestion tool you are employing. Check your own keyword list to see how it works in comparison to those of your competitors. Maybe you have overlooked some key words that you need to include now?

4. Break down Your SEO Keyword List

How does your keyword list now fit in terms of competition, status, search volume, relevance and brand positioning. You want to target ultimately 10 keywords for each SEO campaign – including your brand name and at most four other keywords.

5. Build a Search Engine Optimization Plan

Once you have identified the top 10 keywords to target, simply build your SEO marketing plan with them. Track the trends of the rankings for your keywords and see how much traffic you’re generating from them. The highest performing keywords are those that lead to business conversions.

Tip 1.   Make Sure Your Web Design Has CLEAR Navigation.

The best designed retail websites make shopping online easy.  It is tempting to amaze visitors with a complex and busy look and feel…but resist.  Easy, clear, simple instructions work best. Trying too hard with bells and whistles can result in frustrated shoppers. And they won’t return.

Test to make sure your web design has navigation that is simple to use and understand.  Label instructions clearly explaining exactly what to expect when a person clicks. Selling shoes? Try labels such as Men’s Shoes or Women’s Shoes.

Usability testing can reveal things about how users navigate your site that you might not anticipate.

Tip 2.  Design to Make Sure your Web Navigation is Easy to Access

As we know some of your customers are likely to have health limits that require surfing the web by means of screen readers, Braille displays that are refreshable, screens with magnifiers or additional devices. Try to situate text navigation and skip links at the page heading.

Tip 3: Let the Web Design Tell a Browser Where They Are

To choose where to go on your site, people need to know exactly where they are. As many shoppers are using search engines to find stores online, they can easily find your site on any page – there is no guarantee that they hit your site on the home page – use visual and text clues to show the customer where he or she is on your site. This is known as breadcrumbs.

Tip 4. Design Web Layers to break up Large Sites

Sites with many product categories, many brands or that offer many products, need to include layers of navigation to break it down into easy shopping steps.

Shoppers need to be able to browse by product, price, brand, age, size/colour, gender or just about any other product feature. The navigation design for your web should allow that facility intuitively.

Tip 5: Integrate Search Facilities into the Web Design

Ecommerce websites should allow shoppers to just search for products. Make sure that a Search Box is added to every page on your site and test to make sure it delivers the appropriate results.

Choosing Joomla for your web development has superior strengths to competitor products known as WISIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) platforms like FrontPage or Dreamweaver.

1. Joomla incorporates a Content Management System.

This feature ensures that all your website pages are developed, maintained and updated easily, including adding or removing new pages.  A CMS ability is the key advantage over constructing and coding a website in the straightforward HTML standard language.

2. Joomla is an Open Source web development product

Using Joomla means that there are no licensing fees, costs which you do have to pay for a Microsoft product or an alternative commercial product.  There is also an enormous community of skilled users available online 24 / 7 to provide support.

3. Some other good reasons to develop your website use Joomla!

A very attractive feature of Joomla! is its functionality. It’s great for tasks  such as simple brochure site web development to entire shopping cart sites, or indeed fully interactive online membership websites. Avail of the 3,500 plugins and add-ons to extend its functionality including exciting and easy to use shopping carts, videos, galleries, blogs, forums, project tools – in fact everything you could possibly need to develop your web site.

4. Re-design is easier

Template systems also make it easy to change the look and feel of your site without having to redo the whole site from scratch. You can literally change the whole graphic design/look of the site in a matter of seconds while retaining the content. Find more than 2000 templates, many of them free, allow a web developer to change the look and feel of your site quite easily.

5. Joomla V WordPress

Although WordPress allows web developers to access many plugins too, and can extend to many new functions, it simply doesn’t have the sheer power underlying it’s infrastructure for web developers to easily plug in a comprehensive shopping cart for ecommerce websites for example.

Check out our web development portfolio to see examples of Joomla in action.

Making your online marketing work involves targeting relevant audiences often through several online channels.  These typically can include:

• Pay Per Click (PPC)
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Email Marketing

How do I establish a PPC online marketing campaign?

Managing a good PPC campaign involves spending time on basic keyword research, focusing on your customers. Not all advertisers understand the route chosen to search for a product or service, nor the ideal search phrases to measure.

Our online marketing professionals understand how to research the ideal keyword or phrases to bid on.  They look at competitor bid levels, frequency of search terms, and ‘broad matching’ a bid, having your ad highlighted in results that are relevant or similar.

Recent Online Marketing (Irish) Research Data

[from the Interactive Media Retail Group]

• 51% of The population in the UK purchase online and 15% buy with their cell phone
• Sales worth £45.6 billion were made online from January to October 2010, an increase of 17%, the total figure for 2009 was £49.8 billion – quite an increase!

Retailers who use multiple channels – online, mobile, retail – to reach customers are increasing market share in relation to the dedicated online sites. PPC works on the web and mobile channels.  You need to constantly test, improve and respond to results by measuring responses, links and customer activity.

• Females shoppers spend 20% more time on shopping sites than men Source: comScore
• In a channel value analysis by JC Penney, the typical value of sales for retailers of multiple channels was $900 per year, online only achieved $160 in sales while retail only channel operators achieved on average $200
• Social commerce is now a growing business, 28% of US all online businesses have  reported sales achieved through social media sites are growing significantly Shop.org

Wake up to eCommerce business. Remember opportunities exist as well as risks. Investment at the outset of any online marketing campaign in both strategy and planning will return dividends.

Act now to get your business online.

If you’re about to embark on a new website or a re-design, here are some things to think about when choosing a Web Design company:

1.    Use an established and full service agency to create an effective web design. Dublin has become the European centre for a number of the big online players with Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and others situated here. And there are also quite a number of web design companies offering services, but many of these are relatively small in size. So the trick is to look for a good track record. When you decide to commit additional resources towards improving your web design, you really need to make sure you are using a professional and long established web design agency with a varied client base.

2.    Use web design techniques that work to create good navigation. Clear and consistent paths through your website are crucial to a positive user experience.

3.    If your customers are local, then a Dublin Web Design company will have a greater understanding of your audience when it comes to the online marketing and search engine optimization stage of things. Optimizing for local search is an important factor in targeting this market, especially with Google.

4.    Have clear call to actions on your website, particularly on your home page.

5.    Everybody loves all the extra features available, but if they cause your site to load too slowly you could lose visitors. You might also be penalized by Google for load speed issues.  Be careful not to incorporate too many flash animations, widgets or large images into your web design – your site’s loading time will increase while your time to convert business decreases.

6.    Your customers will want to be able to contact you, so make this as easy for them as possible. Have the links to the contact page clear and have all the channels available so that the prospect can phone or email as they choose.

7.    Have your web design company use search engine friendly URLs so that your keywords can be included in them and have search engine friendly content. For example, to target the phrase ‘web design dublin‘ a good URL would be: http://www.mysite.com/web-design-dublin/

8.    You will probably need to be able to make updates to the site yourself, so make sure that the site is developed with a CMS (Customer Management System) that is straightforward.

Finally, ensure your web design team takes on the needs, desires and requirements of your customers and talks you through the process.

Inspiration is a Dublin Web Design company which has a multi-disciplinary team and oodles of experience of the key things that need to be included into your website to attract, engage and please your customers. And then convert them.

Search Engine Optimization is key to developing any online business today and almost 90% of all online traffic is now driven by search engines.  Today, the way to be found on the Internet is by knowledge – knowing how to use search engine optimization to properly market your company.  There is a huge proliferation of companies and competing offers out there that your customers have to navigate past to get to you.

Search engines work just like a phone directory did in the past, optimizing your data works today on a much larger scale.   Try searching any topic, you will find thousands of businesses that are offering a very similar service, so you need to develop a strategy for your company. At Inspiration we offer a specialized search engine optimization service to do this.

Key Search Engine Optimization Issues

1: Avoid Poor Coding

Ensure that your web pages are created in a technically compliant way. Search Engines bots crawl through web sites by analyzing the sites code. The idea is to make html clean and error free so that these bots are able to index every page of a website. Having errors could undermine your other search engine optimization efforts. All pages on your site might not get indexed by the bots, and ultimately can lead to a lower page ranking.

2: Optimize your search engine access using relevant keywords

For example, if a website is about Lir Irish chocolate, then go after specific typical keywords. “Rich Lir chocolate” and “Lir chocolate truffles” would be excellent keywords because they are very specific. The more specific a keyword is, the less likely other competitors will be to rank in search engines for it. This enables sites to have a higher ranking, and a higher position in key search engines results.

3 Place keywords in smart places to increase Search Engine Optimization

After the keywords are agreed make sure that they appear in the site Title tag as well as the Headings on the page. They should also be in the body of the web page, but be careful not to overdo the keyword density.

4: Attract Inbound Links

A good link building programme with relevant trusted links from other quality websites can boost your sites’ search engine ranking. Try to avoid paid links back or too many reciprocal links. Stay away from link schemes.

If you need to attract online customers, you can rely on Inspired search engine optimization to achieve your goals – contact us today.

Have you seen this?

It’s the recently launched Google +1 button and is Google’s latest attempt to get into the social space. It’s something of an equivalent to the Facebook ‘Like’ button, which has proliferated across the web. Facebook, with its 500m users, has oodles of personal data that could be used to influence search ranking and personalise search. But it hasn’t invested significantly in search and Bing is used to power search on the platform.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has focused so far on areas such as:

o   Site audit

o   Keywords

o   On-page optimization (meta tags and content)

o   Linkbuilding

But the Google +1 could be a new kid on the block.

We’ve had personalised search results from Google and Bing for some time. What you see on a search engine results page (SERP) is not the same as what I see. But this hasn’t changed the fundamental approach to search engine optimization.

How does it work?

The way the +1 button works is that if one of your connections in Google from your Google Profile or Gmail Contacts, Google Reader  or other Google product  ‘ +1s’ an item, then this item is more likely to appear in your search results. So it is only relevant for those who are signed in to their Google account. The limitation to the usefulness of the +1 button is that the amount of people who actively use a Google Profile and connections is so much less than the number actively using Facebook.

Bing has already announced if you are signed in to Facebook, the opinions of your Facebook friends can be used to influence your search results.

How might it affect search engine optimization?

According to Google, the number of +1s does not affect search rankings, though they say it may in the future. This could mean that marketers will need to add the button and actively promote content on sites or pages they wish to rank well. Promotions might focus on ‘+1’ ing the page in a similar way to Facebook competitions and promotions where the user has to ‘Like’ the page.

Depending on how successful the +1 button is, search engine optimisation could be entering a new phase.

Where to get the button

If you want to incorporate the button into your WordPress web design you could add this plugin.

In 2003, WordPress was founded with one piece of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing, and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then, it has grown to be the largest cloud hosted tool for blogging in the world. It is used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.

The open source nature of WordPress web development means that everything you access is freely available. Tutorials are updated and enhanced facilities are published for upgrading your experience as a blogger.  The code was created for all the people using the net by the online community.  WordPress facilitates web development for thousands of people working on the technology at any one time.  It gives you a license- free access to a commercial platform. This means you are free to use it for anything from your holiday blog to your Lotto directory of winnings, without any fees or charges from IT companies for your online presence.

About WordPress.Org

WordPress.Org is the self-hosted solution, that is, you install WordPress on your own hosted site. From here, you can download and install the software and do your own WordPress web development. You will need a web host, but most will meet the technical requirements.  WordPress can be used for almost anything and is completely customizable.

Hosted WordPress Solution

There is also a hosted solution which you will find at WordPress.Com. For this you don’t need your own hosting and you can get started and looking great with a free template in minutes. You can customize this yourself to a degree without any technical ability or database web development skills.

What To Use WordPress For

WordPress web development began life as a simple blogging system, to diary your emails, today it has evolved for use as a full content management system (CMS).  It can now be enhanced by widgets, plugins, themes and is really only limited by your technical ability and your imagination. This is where the web development experts come in. To customize WordPress for your specific requirements you will need significant technical skills.

Develop WordPress web sites with others in the online Community

From forums to mailing lists, get stuck in with WordPress enthusiasts – there are loads of socializing opportunities.  Meet up at WordCamp, the regularly organized meetings for WordPress enthusiasts, bloggers and developers. They’re free (or subsidized) and very welcoming.

Read more on WordPress Web Design or check out these tips on common issues with Website Design for WordPress.

Search engine optimisation (or SEO) is the process of increasing the ranking of a particular a website, or individual webpage, within a set of search results based on the various algorithms of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo!

Search engine optimisation is a tool commonly used by web developers and digital copywriters to increase the visibility of online content. In short, it allows people to find what they want quickly and easily, which is essential in the fast-paced and expansive world of the internet.

If you’re looking for an inspired search engine optimisation solution to increase the visibility of your business online, then speak to Inspiration Marketing, the online and direct marketing specialists.

Inspired SEO

Inspiration Marketing is regarded as one of Ireland’s most experienced and dynamic Online and Direct Marketing Consultancy. We specialise in developing tailor-made online strategies that encompass web design, web development and search engine optimisation for businesses of all sizes.

Our approach is has been meticulously designed based on the understanding that the visibility of a webpage is based on a variety of search engine optimisation factors. We have developed and documented a detailed search engine optimisation strategy that can be used by business of all sizes, in almost any sector.

To guarantee your success, our strategy utilises a combination of keyword strategies, copy, link building techniques, regular monthly reporting, tracking and directory and search engine submission strategies.

This approach incorporates a variety of tried and tested search engine optimisation best practices in order to generate activity and visibility on the web. The level of investment required to gain visibility often depends on the industry but we can advise you on the best approach for your sector.

Why Inspiration Marketing?

Inspiration Marketing employs a multidisciplinary team that specializes in using a variety of search engine optimization techniques to improve visibility and drive traffic to your website. For more information about how we can help you be seen and be heard by improving your business’s online presence, contact us by email or call us on +353 (1) 230 3184