Forest Software
Web, SEO and IT & Business Advice for the Smaller Business
Reading Time: 2 minutes
Last updated on March 4th, 2024 at 04:38 pm
Earlier on in the week I attended the launch of a new website that has been created to promote e-businesses and businesses with websites in the Conwy area. The econwyrural website was set up to promote the diversity of businesses in the area and the advantages of living and working in the Conwy area.
It was interesting to see the mix of businesses that have initially been chosen to appear on the site – these include photographers, a craft shop in Llanrwst , adventure holidays, jewellery makers and even a supplier of glass eyes. The common factors in all of these businesses is their use of the internet to promote themselves and the love that they have for the area. Living in the area I know just what the econwy rural site means when it talks about inspirational views and quality of life in the area – for example I got up this morning and drove down the road a few hundred yards and came across this scene overlooking the Conwy Valley into Snowdonia. This kind of view makes you realise that there is a lot more to life than living in a city. Continue reading
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Last updated on September 5th, 2019 at 11:24 am
This is a question that many website owners will probably answer with “that’s easy – it stands for Search Engine Optimisation”. But I need you to think a little deeper than that.
When you say search engine optimisation just what exactly do you mean? Again, the answer is probably “getting to the top of the search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo”. I would agree that that is normally the aim of any SEO professional but would like to ask you one further question.
What do you want to get to the top of the search engines for? It is all very well saying that you want to be at the top of the search results but I truly believe that the mark of a good and successful SEO campaign is not measured by positions, or even by traffic (visitors to the site) but can be measured by clients or sales. If you stop for a moment and think the idea of most SEO should be to get visitors to your site that are looking for the service or product that you provide – many of these are unlikely to have ever heard of you so will not be searching for you by name. Once they are on the site it is the job of the page content to convince the visitor to contact you / sign up for a newsletter / buy your products or what ever it is your site is “selling”. A good seo person should see the whole thing in its entirety and not just as a technical exercise in getting top results. Continue reading
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Last updated on April 13th, 2015 at 02:15 pm
This blog article is about email marketing and how to get it very badly wrong, in fact so wrong that it can harm your business.
In the week between Christmas and the New Year I got three emails from a supplier that I used once towards the end of last year. While I expect now-days to get emails from businesses that I have used once – even though it is annoying that there is no way to choose not to receive these emails when you buy from many online sites this supplier failed in so many ways.
Within the space of 2 days I got three emails, all giving me details of special offers on their on-line shop. I’ve listed below the problems with these emails :-
- They were all related to offers that expired before Christmas ! You can probably appreciate how annoying this can be to a prospective customer.
- When I tried to email the supplier back I realised that it had been sent from a “no-reply” email address, meaning that there was no way to contact them directly.
- The unsubscribe link on the email ended up with an error on their website – meaning there was no way to unsubscribe from future emails.
- They linked to their Twitter account on all of the emails – guess what – the link to the Twitter account also ended up with an error on their website where they were trying to count the number of people clicking the link.