The Daily Blog
2010
Mar
10

Search Engine Optimisation: A Bibliography

We’re often asked by customers for more information about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – it’s a seemingly inexhaustible topic, and one which can often seem daunting at first.

We’ll continue to publish occasional blog articles on the subject (in fact, if there’s something specific you’d like to know leave us a comment and we’ll get on the case!), but we thought it might be helpful to provide a ‘further reading’ list of a few places you can go for expert advice and discussion. It’s well worth browsing the archives of these sites:

1) http://www.seobook.com/blog

Another excellent blog with some really useful tools, like the SEObook toolbar, and a ‘7 Days to SEO Success’ free email course that contains some helpful information to start with.

2) http://www.seomoz.org/blog

Phenomenally informative blog from some serious experts in the industry. You’ll see that as well as an incredibly useful blog, SEOmoz also has a tools section with a few freebies which might help you finetune your SEO habits, plus some useful guides. If you’re willing to splash a bit of cash, there are member advantages.

3) http://www.seo-chicks.com

A relatively new and very accessible blog with a mixture of technical SEO articles and wider industry-relevant features.

4) http://searchengineland.com

A plethora of information on all aspects of online marketing. Well worth trawling through the features and columns sections.

There’s a wealth of information across these sites, but they really are well worth a rummage through the archives. Most of them also have newsletters and Twitter accounts that you can follow if you’d like to be kept up to date – why not sign up to a few and see what you learn?

By Cat | Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | Comments (0)
2010
Mar
9

Want to work at Daily?

We’re so busy that we need an extra pair of hands! So, we’re after a Junior Systems Administrator to come and join us in our Chilwell offices (with occasional forays to the local datacentre).

You’ll need some specific Sys Admin skills and to be interested in developing skills yourself, but you’ll also be given plenty of training.

Take a look at the job specification & application details and get it in touch if you think you fit the bill.

By Cat | Posted in About Daily | Comments (0)
2010
Feb
24

The eShop community is now live!

We’ve launched a community for online shops!

The Daily eShop Forum is intended to create a space where people who have eShops can share their tips and tricks, ask questions and make suggestions.

Everyone at Daily is a forum member too, of course, and we’ll be checking in regularly, so if you need our advice or have a question or suggestion for us just log in (you’ll need to register as  a forum member first, though you can read previous discussions without logging in) and either post a new topic or join an existing conversation if it seems relevant.

Of course, a community really needs participation to make it work, so if you already have an eShop or you’re interested in setting up an online shop but would like a little more advice before you dive in, head on over to http://forum.daily.co.uk and join in! It might take a little while to get going, but we’re sure that our eShop customers will find it really useful to have a place to share their thoughts with each other and make suggestions to us. As a starter for ten, why not use the forum to make some suggestions for things you think we could do to help us support your online shop business?

By Cat | Posted in Hints & Tips, Online Shopping, Online Shops, eShop | Comments (0)
2010
Feb
17

Pay-per-click advertising, part five: managing your campaign

If you’ve been following our series of articles about PPC advertising, you should feel pretty confident that you know how to build and launch a well-structured pay per click ad campaign. If you want to check that your ads are appearing without creating extra impressions (which could skew your analysis of the effectiveness of the ad), use Google’s Ad Preview Tool to search under your keywords.

Happy that your carefully thought out ad campaign is live? Ready to put your feet up and wait for the sales to come rolling in? Well, if you want to get the best results from PPC (and spend your precious budget wisely), you can’t just launch your campaign and forget about it – you’ll need to keep on top of it. So, here are a few things to think about when managing your campaign.

Pruning

Once your campaign’s been up and running for a little while, you’ll be able to figure out which of your creatives and keywords are doing well and which aren’t. Go through your campaigns and look for keywords which have generated a cost but no sales/leads and put them on ‘pause’ to stop you burning money on keywords which don’t result in a conversion to sale/lead.

Take a look at the performance of your creatives and pause anything which has a very low Click Through Rate (CTR) and/or conversion rate. If the CTR is low, it means that for whatever reason that creative is just not grabbing the attention of the people who see it – so, time to rethink. If you’re getting the clickthroughs but the conversion rate is poor, people were interested in what your ad said but not persuaded by what they found on your website. Put your brutally honest hat on and ask yourself a few questions: are you overpromising in your ad so that people are arriving at your site and finding out the tempting offer isn’t so tempting after all? is your website as clear as it could be? have you made sure that the creative links directly to the relevant page rather than tipping them in at the home page and making them rummage? do you need more of a feel of ‘you can trust us’ about your website (e.g. clear design, recognisable partner and/or payment provider logos, a postal address and phone number, testimonials, clear delivery/returns/privacy policy information, etc)?

Expanding

Now that you’ve paused the things which aren’t working, you should have a bit of budget freed up to push towards the things which are. So:

- Where keywords are generating leads at a good price, bid up and see if you can grab a bit more of the traffic

- While you’re at it, if you’ve got keywords which are generating cost-effective leads, think about how you can expand upon them. Can you create new keyword phrases which are similar? Perhaps consider relaxing the match type from ‘Exact’ to ‘Phrase’ or even ‘Broad’ if you’re confident your budget can cope and you want to expand your reach?

- You’ll have some creatives that are working well and have good CTRs and conversion rates, which should give you a feel for what entices your potential customers to both click on your ad and, crucially, make the purchase. Try writing new variations of your creative using these as a guide.

- Use the Search Query Report (here’s Google on how to set that up) to identify possible new keywords to add to your campaign. You can also use it to identify negative keywords that you can add.

Negative keywords?

Yep! As well as adding keywords for which you do want your ads to appear, you can stipulate keywords for which you don’t want your ads to appear. Why would you do that? Well, imagine that you sell clothing but only stock womenswear and your footwear range doesn’t include trainers. There’s no point in your ad appearing to people interested in trainers or menswear as you’ll just be racking up clickthrough costs when you don’t stock the product the searcher was after and so won’t make a sale. If you add ‘trainers’, ‘menswear’, ‘y-fronts’ etc to your negative keywords list, you’ll guard against this and thus make your campaign more efficient.

Here’s a bit more from Google about negative keywords.

Interested in more about PPC?

And that’s the end of our walkthrough for setting up and managing a pay per click advertising campaign – I hope it’s been helpful for you! But, it’s such an important (and sometimes mysterious!) subject that there’s plenty more I could talk about. I could happily waffle on about random aspects of PPC, but this is the perfect opportunity for you to direct what I talk about by asking those niggling questions. So, do you have any burning questions about PPC? Is there something which has been confusing you since you first logged in to Google AdWords? Leave a comment and we’ll use your questions as the starting point for the next PPC article.

Previous articles in this series:

An Introduction to Pay Per Click Advertising

A little about PPC match types

Writing your ads

Budgets for PPC campaigns

By Cat | Posted in PPC, Search Engines | Comments (0)
2010
Feb
10

Instant Website Upgrades

Over the next few days we will be upgrading our Instant Website packages to include lots of new features.

Don’t worry – if you already have an Instant Website you won’t be losing any existing features and there won’t be any downtime when we roll out the upgrades either.

In brief, the upgrades will add the following to Instant Website packages:

  • YouTube Support – You can embed YouTube videos into your web pages
  • Support for Google Chrome and  Safari 3+ browsers
  • A banner option on both the top and bottom of your pages

There are also the updates in the ‘Page Editor’:

  • Improved Tables
  • Upgraded Spell Checker
  • Extra Fonts
  • Enhanced Undo/Redo options
  • More user-friendly tool bar
  • Faster loading of the editor

We think you’re going to like the new features and that they’ll improve your whole Instant Website experience, but please let us know what you think.

The upgrades will start on Wednesday 10th February.

By Ray | Posted in Instant Website | Comments (0)
2010
Feb
3

Knowledge Base vs Photographic Memory

One of our Support guys had some praise from a customer today, who said that it’s refreshing to speak to a company who is not trying to get them off the ‘phone as quickly as possible.

This is something we do strive towards and I’ll never have any targets for the Support team to have maximum call lengths or anything like that, so you can rest assured that if you do need to call us then our main concern will be resolving your issue and not thinking about the next call before we’ve even finished the current one.

Following on from last week’s article about our knowledge base, it’s worth pointing out that it’s there in support of, and not as a replacement for, our customer support team.

At times we may refer you to specific articles, either on the telephone or in a helpdesk ticket. We don’t do this to deal with your issue faster for our benefit, though, but for yours.  Some tasks and questions may seem very simple at first, but it often turns out there are a fair few steps involved and there can be a lot to remember when discussing it verbally.

A good example is if you are new to transferring com/net/org domain names. After you’ve done a few then you can probably make a transfer with your eyes closed, but if it’s the first time you have done one then there can be a lot to take in: different contact email addresses on the domain, what company to request the transfer from, checking WHOIS for the locking status, making sure you have the EPP code, any transfer/renewal fee, checking the status of WHOIS privacy, seeing if the registration is past the 60 day limit etc.

We’re quite happy to go through all these steps on the telephone if you want, but we often find the transfers that fail are the ones where customers have just simply been overwhelmed by the different steps and trying to take it all in. Often we hear callers frantically trying to scribble down all the steps we’re talking them through.

This is where our Knowledge Base comes in. We have simple to follow, step-by-step guides (with screen shots)  for all common tasks like this, so there’s really no need to make notes on the telephone or struggle to remember everything we are telling you – you can just refer to the guide at your leisure.

Feedback from our customers is very positive – we’re told that having a knowledge base article to refer to takes a lot of the stress out of some tasks. It’s generally a lot easier to work through some clearly laid-out steps in your own time than to try to remember what was said or decipher hastily-written notes from a ‘phone call, and if you do hit a problem then you can call about that specific step so we can get you through it.

So, rest assured: if we do ever send you an article it’s because we think it’s the best way we can help you out.

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We spend a lot of time making sure the knowledge base is informative as possible and always welcome requests for new articles, so if there’s anything that you’d like a guide for just drop us a line or leave a comment.

By Ray | Posted in Hints & Tips | Comments (0)
2010
Jan
27

Need a little help?

We like to think that our customer support is some of the best in the business – take a look at the blog articles Ray, our Support Manager, has written to see what I mean. Good support doesn’t just mean having knowledgeable people on the other end of the phone, though – it’s about anticipating questions and providing access to quality hints and tips that customers can access whenever they need to.

So, if you take a look at the Daily.co.uk website you’ll spy a shiny new help button at the top. This’ll take you straight to our knowledge base, which has been around for quite a while, although we’d be the first to admit that we’ve not shouted about it as much as it deserves.

It’s a great first port of call if you have a question about one of our products or services. You’ll find helpful ‘Getting Started’ guides on subjects including getting listed on search engines, which web hosting package you need, and transferring an existing site to Daily. There are sections for each of our product types, a troubleshooting section to deal with some of the more common issues, and general information about things like payments and backup services.

For example, if you want to make sure you can pick up your emails on the go there’s a handy walkthrough to help you configure your email to work with an iPhone. If you’re keen to grab a slice of the online shopping market, maybe our guide to choosing and changing an eShop template will be of interest?

We’ve also produced a series of video tutorials – head to the eShop and Email sections to take a look at videos for everything from importing/exporting eShop data to setting up Outlook.

You’ll see that you can rate each article for helpfulness, so do let us know what you think. Ultimately, though, the knowledgebase is there for you, so if there’s something for which you’d like to see a tutorial, drop me a line and I’ll pass the feedback straight to Ray!

By Cat | Posted in Hints & Tips | Comments (0)
2010
Jan
11

Pay Per Click Ads, Part Four: Money Matters

If you’ve been following our series on pay per click advertising, you should have a well organised collection of keywords and corresponding adverts. You’re almost ready to go, so it’s time to talk cash.

How deep are your pockets?

First things first – how much money do you have available for your PPC advertising campaign? If you’ve claimed your Google AdWords vouchers, free with web hosting, Virtual Private Servers, online shops and instant websites, you’ll have a bit of a head start for the launch of your campaign  That aside, though, for the sake of keeping track of your finances you really need to be thinking in terms of a monthly budget.

So, what can you spare? Figure out from that how much you want to spend per day. You’ll see that Google recommends a daily budget based on your keywords – if your budget is lower than this, Google aims to deliver the ads when demand is greatest, which means you should have presence at the busiest times but your ads won’t be available to be seen 24/7. The trick is to find the best possible balance between what you can afford and what the market will deliver.

Here’s a bit more from Google about campaign budgets.

Setting your bid prices

You’ll also need to give some thought to bid prices. For each keyword, you’ll need to consider both what you can afford to bid and what the market price is – if other people are paying over £1 per click your ad won’t get displayed if you’re only prepared to pay 50p. Inevitably, some keywords will cost more than others because they’re more popular so you’ll need to balance the higher cost per click against the higher potential rewards of a popular search term.

Here’s a bit more from Google about bidding.

It’s time to launch your campaign!

Now that you’ve built your campaign and sorted out your budget it’s finally time to go live! Once you’ve done so, you can check that your ads are appearing without racking up impressions at: https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

Don’t just fire your campaign off into the ether and leave Google to it, though – to get the best results you need to keep an eye on how all your keywords are performing. We’ll talk a bit more about ongoing campaign management in the next article.

Earlier Articles in this series

Part One – Generating your keywords

Part Two – Keyword match types

Part Three – Writing your adverts

By Cat | Posted in PPC, Search Engines | Comments (0)
2009
Dec
10

So, what does your email address say about you?

A few weeks ago, I was amused to find myself described as part of  ‘the aristocracy of the internet’. Am I a venerable sort  who’s been instrumental in developing amazing widgets? Er, not quite. I have, though, got my own domain name.

In her column in the Times Online, Caitlin Moran recently talked about the assumptions she makes about people from the type of email address people have. Yahoo! and Hotmail email addresses are described as ‘a trifle… shabby’, there’s a faint whiff of ‘must try harder’ for those who have an email address associated with their internet service provider, and poor old AOL email address holders don’t fare terribly well in her assessment at all.

Now, I’m sure Ms Moran would be the first to admit that these assumptions are entirely subjective but she does have a point. People do make quick judgments about others. We know that first impressions count, which is why few people turn up to job interviews or first dates in tracksuit trousers and trainers. So why not give yourself the opportunity to create a strong first impression online too?

With your own domain name, you tell people a little something about you or about your business, which has got to present a better front than if you just tell them who you get your internet from (and that 37 other people with your name also do, which is why you’ve got the number 38 after your name). You’re also suddenly immune to having to change your email address if you find a better broadband deal elsewhere, and you can still pick up your email via webmail if that’s easier for you (you can forward it to Gmail and have the best of both worlds, too, if you like). Frankly, there aren’t really any down sides – and isn’t a few quid per year worth it to save yourself the hassle of changing addresses and create a good impression when you apply for that job?

You get email services free with any domain name registration, but if you need a service with more features and flexibility you can always use your domain with one of our specialist email packages.

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If you’d like to read the column that inspired this post, here it is. Be warned, though – Ms Moran does not mince her words! Her views, of course, are her’s and not necessarily Daily’s. Some of us couldn’t help laughing in places, though…

By Cat | Posted in Domain Names | Comments (0)
2009
Dec
8

Half Price Business Web Hosting is back!

We know that this is a popular offer – and with business quality web hosting for less than £55 per year we’re not surprised – so we’ve decided to end the year with a bang.

Grab your bargain Business hosting now.

Not quite ready to build your website yet? Not to worry – we’re giving away an Online Business Card with every domain name bought before the end of January, so you can start getting traffic – and potential customers – to your domain straight away.

Just quote promo code ‘FREEBIZ’ when you buy your domain and Business Card to claim your freebie.

Claim your free business card now

By Cat | Posted in Domain and Web Hosting Offers | Comments (0)
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