My article about marketing through the bad times was published is the local paid daily paper on Tuesday July 14th:

“In these uncertain economic times…”

Are you fed up with hearing that yet? There is nothing uncertain about it; we are in a recession.

So, is it time to chop your marketing budget, or to invest more in marketing to strengthen your claim to the business that is out there to be won?

I am a marketing guy and therefore you can probably guess what my opinion will be. But I do have evidence… honest! At Upstream Connections (the SEO and Internet Marketing company where I work), we have not stopped growing in the last 12 months and let me tell you how: marketing. And, of course, being great at what we do.

The big buzzword of the moment is “engagement” (thank goodness; “synergy” was getting tired) and “engagement” is a great place to start thinking about how to market your company in a recession. On a local level, networking groups are a great way to meet real life human beings and boost your profile. We are repeatedly told that the best kind of engagement is “a conversation with your prospects”. Imagine having a real conversation; that’s what networking groups like the BHCC and CADIA offer.

Digitally, the equivalent is business networking sites like LinkedIn and Ecademy, where you can spread your net much further afield. One great benefit of finding people through these sites is that there is no travelling involved and the time commitment is smaller. The downside is that you often don’t meet your prospect face to face.

By networking, you will make yourself visible to a small batch of people at a time. At Upstream Connections, we firmly believe that you should be visible to as many people as possible, all of the time and Search Engine Optimisation is the best way to make that happen. By ranking well in Google for the searches that reflect your business you give your prospects a quick and easy way to find you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

If you are worried that your website itself isn’t up to scratch, we provide all SEO clients with a free, review of their website in the first month of work. For most businesses, basic is best.

These are hard times for sure, but there is still plenty of new business to be had. The best way to get those enquiries is to push your marketing in the most cost-effective way possible and forge the relationships that will see your business blossom when times are better.

This just in from Hitwise:

During February 2009, 1 in 35 UK internet visits was to a video website. That’s up 40.7% on last year, when the figure was 1 in 50.

At Upstream Connections, we love video. Quality video content on an ecommerce site helps inspire confidence and greatly improves conversion rates (if applied correctly). Did you know that a well-timed video can also be a route into Google’s top 10 results?

This is a result of Google’s much vaunted (and much maligned) Univeral Search. In a nutshell, Universal Search is an attempt to provide search results from a variety of sources, including blogs, images, authority sites like Wikipedia and video sites like YouTube. If you can create an interesting video with the right title, you have the potential to leapfrog onto Google’s front page. This can be particulary useful if you are selling a product that people search for using its name.

If you are interested in our video production services, drop us a line and let’s talk!

For anyone who’s interested in how the Upstream office building looks, check out this video which we made last year:

Sadly, you won’t see our subterranean office itself, but what a nice building, huh?

Upstream Connections started as a specialist SEO company in 2003. We recently celebrated 5 years in business… which is a long time in this industry.

I started working here as a freelancer way back in 2005, when Upstream operated out of a small office in the Brighton Media Centre. Since then, we moved to a bigger office, then an even bigger office and more recently to an even bigger office in Hove. During these years, we have been very privileged to work with clients in a huge range of industries, from language schools to power tools, via mobile phones, secured loans, tourism and financial software.

A lot has changed in those five years. When we started, most people would be slightly baffled by the mention of “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimisation“. Fast forward five years and the mainstream press is full of Search-related stories, journalists are given SEO training (which sometimes leads to bizarre coat tail grabbing headlines like this) and a little huddle forms at parties when you mention that you know how to get sites performing better in Google. The final point is not necessarily a good thing.

We are, first and foremost, an SEO company. But did you know we offer a whole range of internet services?

As you may well have seen on our homepage, we regularly design websites for clients. One big advantage of an Upstream-designed site is that you needn’t worry about whether it will be search-engine-friendly. You can be sure of it.

You can see some examples of our design work here and here.

We have a dedicated team of designers and programmers. We also work with a selection of highly talented freelancers, who can give a different perspective on a project.

Having great search results is only one part of doing business online. If users are not convinced by the site they arrive at, they will not want to do business with it. People are more trusting of quality websites now that they were even a couple of years ago, but are arguably less trusting of sites that appear dated or in any way suspicious. It is very important to keep on top of your image.

One of the great attractions of doing business online is being able to attract custom from around the world. To really connect with different cultures, you need to be sure that your website expresses exactly what you want it to. Our in house translation agency can ensure that you get a quality translation for a competitive price.

With the Pound set to struggle against the Euro for the forseeable future, now is the time to start appealing to overseas clients. Quality, localised text on your site is a big step forward. The next step is…

Upstream Connections offers SEO in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese.

Britain has one of the most developed internet economies in the world, but continental Europe is not far behind. If you want to make the most of your potential customer base in the coming years, you may want to look to the other side of the channel.

If you would like to see some examples of our work, get in touch and we would be more than happy to show you what we can do.

Links to your website are still a very important part of search engine optimisation. There are a number of ways that you can acquire these links, but the best way is to create quality content that people want to link to.

We have a specialist team in place to promote quality content in the places that bring the best return in terms of links and visitors. Check out our accent game and evolution of mobile phones video for a couple of examples.

So…

Making money online is a matter of providing the right service at the right price and making sure the right people can find you. Sounds familiar? The methods may be slightly different to traditional business, but the bottom line is just the same. If you want our help in making your website profitable, get in touch.

Last Friday Jose and I attended dConstruct 2008 in Brighton, an annual conference aimed at those “designing and building the latest generation of social web applications”.

Held at the Brighton Dome, there were hundreds of people in attendance, representing companies and web startups from all over the world; and in terms of insight into the increasingly social nature of the web, the conference was a tremendously informative and constructive way to spend a Friday!

Amongst the speakers on the day were Daniel Burka (creative designer at Digg and co-founder of budding social network Pownce), Matt Jones and Matt Bidulph (the co-founders of Dopplr, a social network for ‘intelligent travellers’, Steven Johnson (co-creator of FEED, plastic.com, and most recently, the particularly interesting ‘hyperlocal media site’, outside.in), Tantek Çelik (ex Chief Technologist at Technorati), as well as several other experts in the rapidly-growing field of a phrase we heard all too many times during the day: the social web.

Some of the more interesting revelations during the day for us included the concept of microformats, a simple, open data format built upon the web standards, which (amongst many other uses) combine with widely-adopted web standards to help create a ’semantic web’. One example of a useful bonus of microformats would be an address listing on a web page – if marked up as such, you can find this address on one of the popular mapping sites in a single click, rather than having to copy-paste and bring it up on a separate site.

outside.in was a particularly interesting idea for me – making the web more geographical. Since everything else we do in life is centred on where we are, it stands to reason that the internet should become more like this as it evolves. Whilst it’s still in its relatively early stages of development, I definitely recommend checking out the site and seeing how it works – it’s far too intricate to go into any level of detail here!

Finishing off proceedings was an extremely interesting talk on ‘the system of the world’ from acclaimed web developer (and deep thinker, clearly) Jeremy Keith, who spoke mainly about certain patterns found in nature and how they relate to social interactivity, the ‘wisdom of crowds’, and how today’s web developers can encompass these concepts in design and functionality. At least… that’s what I got out of it.

While Jose and I felt very much out-nerded by an entire auditorium of people clutching Macbooks and iPhones (we made do with an Eee PC and an N95), there was certainly a lot to take in; and there was plenty of transferable knowledge for us to work into our site designs, web apps, and overall understanding of social bookmarking and networking sites.

All in all, an extremely interesting day, with plenty to remember, and plenty to have forgotten thanks to the constant deluge of information… thankfully dConstruct have been kind enough to deliver all the sessions thanks to the magic of podcasting – take a look if you’re that way inclined, or perhaps if you’ve just got a few hours to burn!

Check out the dConstruct08 group on Flickr for photos of the event!

Still looking for the right photo….

For all its public travails, nobody can accuse Yahoo!’s developers from slacking off. We were quite excited to see del.icio.us results being integrated into SERPs a couple of months ago, and are very excited to learn about SearchMonkey.

Effectively, SearchMonkey allows developers and webmasters to affect how their sites appear in SERPs. Of course, this has always been possible through meta description tags, but Yahoo! are now pushing this to the next level.

SearchMonkey allows you to make incredibly visual listings, as illustrated above.

The potential of this is huge for driving qualified traffic – the goal of most SEO work. Would you be more likely to click on a plain, old textual entry, or a visual one with more information?

As a site owner, you have to provide Yahoo! with structured data to create these listings, according to the guidelines laid out here. Once you structure the information as Yahoo! want to see it, you can include user reviews, addresses, phone numbers, prices, photos and smarter page summaries in your listing.

With this and del.icio.us intergration, Yahoo! are giving us a glimpse into their vision of search in the coming years. It will be very interesting to see Google’s response – while they still hold a 90% market share in the UK and much of Europe, advances like this could well threaten the hegemony in the medium to long term. Yahoo!’s market share in the States is still much higher than in Europe – around 20% in April 2008.

Search Engine Optimisation is more than just getting top positions – it is making sure that this visibility converts into visits and sales. We are keeping a close eye on this cheeky SearchMonkey.

I’ve been busy writing about internet marketing for Sussex’s daily paid paper The Argus. Here’s today’s offering:

For the past week, Google UK has allowed Adwords users to bid on trademarked names. Advertisers still can’t use the trademark in their advert (unless the trademark is theirs, of course) but can bid to have their advert appear when someone searches for the name in Google.

For example, two weeks ago, a search for “iPod” brought up only two paid advertisers: Apple’s own online store and a price comparison site. Now, all of the major names like Argos, Dixons, Curry’s and Comet are bidding on the keyword, alongside niche websites (paying an average of around 60p per click).

This matters on a local scale too. One of Brighton’s many small estate agents, for example, could now bid on the name of a higher profile rival. “Gentlemen’s Agreements” not to bid on each others’ names are technically illegal (although there are murmurs that the large car companies are doing just this).

Google’s motivation for this change is clear: money, and lots of it. But where does this leave businesses? Not only can rivals now advertise on the strength of your reputation but, as the owner of a trademark, you now have to allocate more money to your own Adwords campaign to ensure that you still appear top!

Fortunately, there are some ways that you can put yourself at an advantage when bidding for your trademark (or any keyword). Firstly, word your advert carefully. Google will automatically give your advert a “Quality Score”, which is based on how relevant your advert is for a particular search. The higher your Quality Score, the less you have to pay to get high positions for your ads.

Also, remember that the content of your website itself is very important: have a sitemap and contact page on there, and make sure that there is text about the product you are selling. Search engines like text that they can read easily, so html is much better than flash.

If your website is well optimised for the search engines, this also has a positive effect on the cost of Adwords. Elements like site structure and which other sites link to it are very important. This is known as search engine optimisation, or SEO. Being at the top of Google’s natural results also brings a lot of visitors.

One very good (and easy) idea is to set up a selection of different adverts for the same search and see which one performs best over a couple of weeks. This is a great way of finding the right wording for your ad.

If you are confused, there are lots of online forums that can offer advice. Just search Google!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Big developments are in the pipeline for our paid search consultancy. Keep your eyes peeled!

Hello there, and a happy Monday to everyone.

Upstream Connections is very much a Brighton SEO. Some of our longest-standing clients are based in and around the fine city of Brighton & Hove, with more around the whole of Sussex. In fact, Brighton is home to a bewildering array of internet startups, websites, design companies and marketing companies like ourselves.

The whole new media boom is very good for a city that, despite appearances, is not especially wealthy. Sure, property in and around town sells for a small fortune and you often see Aston Martins and Bentleys rolling along Western Road, but this wealth is generally generated out of town. The internet boom has allowed local companies to compete on a national level. Brighton SEO companies, web designers, programmers, developers and marketers have lower overheads than their equivalents in the Big Smoke and can offer much better value. There are even parts of London that can be reached more quickly from the coast than from the other side of London.

Brighton’s Search Engine Optimisation community growing by the day. Alongside the longest established Brighton SEOs, companies like ourselves are growing at a rate. We are very proud to be attracting major clients like the Carphone Warehouse, who would traditionally have gone with more a more famous name. That our relationship will shortly be going into its third year should speak volumes about our work.

On another note…
Keep your eyes peeled in tomorrow’s Argus for another “The Bottom Line” column. This week I have written about handling negative blog or forum posts – an issue that is becoming increasingly relevant as Google has recently started launching forum and blog posts to the top of SERPs in record time. What should you do if you find yourself victim of a bad post? Picking up a copy of tomorrow’s Argus would be a good start.