Like-minded marketing man

[mbailey]

I found this site after receiving a marketing tip for my own site from Peter Hale!

I'm Martin Bailey, Marketing Manager for a software company and author of Marketing your Business. I've specialised in what I'd class as 'fly by the seat of your pants' marketing - making small businesses look bigger by focusing on image and service.

I've written dozens of website, some of which have won awards and most of which receive good traffic through search engines.

I wrote the book last year after backing up my hard disc one weekend and seeing all of the short 'factsheets' I'd written dealers and customers on how to perform various marketing activities. The book is divided into two sections, theory and practical - the theory examines various aspects that you need to consider, such as internal/external communications, the media, advertising etc. The practical gives step-by-step advice on items such as writing press releases and newsletters, designing websites, publicising websites etc.

If I had the time I'd have done a forum like this on my own site, but why re-invent the wheel now when this site's available! As it is I regularly add in a few software reviews and marketing tips, and have made some dliluted versions of chapters available as factsheets.

Martin Bailey
Author: Marketing your Business
www.marketingyour.biz

[peterjhale]

Hi Martin and welcome

I trust the tip was good and you can maybe recommend us
Looking forward to your expert advice

Peter

[mbailey]

Your tip is already live on my site - I'll be contacting you shortly re the second revision of my book, due next year!

[peterjhale]

Many thanks for the link

Maybe you could give my website a review and let me know how to improve my rankings/ promos

I have some articles posted at www.teneric.co.uk/businessinfo.html and there are the free downloads at www.teneric.co.uk/free_downloads.html

[mbailey]

Try these meta tags in addition to your current ones for starters:

<meta name="company" content="YOUR NAME HERE">
<meta name="homepage" content="HTTP://YOUR WEB ADDRESS HERE">
<meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache">
<meta http-equiv="expires" content="0">
<meta name="distribution" content="Global">
<meta name="rating" content="General">
<meta name="revisit-after" content="7 days">
<meta name="robots" content="follow, index">

These do the following:
1. Force certain search engines not to cache pages, thereby always spidering the latest
2. Shows that each page does not expire
3. Shows that the content is for worldwide distribution, not just relevant to one geographic area
4. Shows that the site has a general rating, e.g not hardcore porn
5. Forces search engines to revisit every seven days!
6. Forces them to index every page and follow every link on every page!
Also, on the front page of the site I'd make the paragraph titles into hyperlinks in addition to those within the stories. Some of your images don't hyperlink anywhere (top picture under Business plans, for example). Also, add in ALT tags to all images - search engines spider these.

The site map is very good - search engines look for this, and with the above meta tags this will ensure that all pages are seen. Dynamically generated pages, such as forums are not the problem they once were, so these will be indexed also! This is great as they are likely to yield a great deal of very specific and relevant traffic.

I would suggest revamping your page titles to add in more relevant keywords.

That's about it as I only had time for a short glance...

[bizindex]

I have seen some of those extra META tags on a few sites and always wondered what they do or if they work.

Thanks MB

[peterjhale]

I wouldn't actually worry about any of these. Spiders generally do what they want unless it's noindex/ nofollow.


I have none of these and rank very well for highly popular terms

It mainly:

> Different page title per page optimised for what's on that page
> Those keywords per page at the beginning, middle and end
> Have one bold and one italic
> Tons of inbound links from other related sites with those keywords

ps - I've moved this thread also

[melaniejoy]

I do not recommend that anyone use all those META tags.
I use to have many of them on my site.
But, I learned that they just pushed my content further down on the page.
As soon as I removed them my site went up in the search engine rankings.
The only tags I recommend are the description and keyword tags.

[mbailey]

Well, all I can say from personal experience is that they work for me and I got them from a company that makes its living from getting sites ranked highly... A simple search on the Internet will show you how search engines use these meta tags.

One point I would note also is that search engines rank sites based on keywords appearing near the top and the bottom of a page. It may be that the inclusion of these additional lines in the <HEAD> section moved specific keywords just 'out of range'. A little trick I use to counteract that is to take out all of the javascript into an external file and call it separately - this can shave several KB off the size of a page, and once it's loaded it is also cached, so it won't have to be loaded for any other pages that call the same file.