But if the first thing you do when you whip out your smartphone is look for a Wi-Fi network to connect to, the launch of 4G by mobile phone network operator EE could be the answer to your prayers.

4G promises superfast data connections even where there is no available Wi-Fi network, meaning big email attachments can download in seconds and videos can stream without taking ages to buffer.

The possible impact for webmasters, though, is much more general than these specific examples of ‘things that might be faster on 4G’.

 For instance, just as tablets have made screen resolutions bigger on mobile devices, so 4G increases the acceptable page size – including any graphics you might want to use on it.

You no longer need, necessarily, to have a no-frills mobile template for your pages; now you can keep all of those high-res logos and brand images you spent a fortune on having designed by your web design company in Manchester.

However, while 4G is ‘here’, it’s not yet widespread – just 11 cities got coverage on launch day, and only a third of the population will have access by the end of the year.

It’s a development worth tracking, but it could be some time before high-resolution website images can be downloaded in a heartbeat via a mobile data connection.

Written by Rob Henry

Back in the early days of the internet, there was Internet Explorer, and Netscape Navigator. Later came Firefox, Safari, Opera and, perhaps most disruptively of all, Chrome.

And each time a new browser was launched to the market, online marketing companies and web developers faced the question of whether to design sites for full cross-browser compatibility with it, or whether to focus solely on the existing market leaders.

But the days of websites proudly stating “Optimised for Microsoft Internet Explorer 7″ are gone, and now the question is an even broader one – how do you design a website that works well not just in any desktop browser, but on smartphone and tablet displays too?

The Right Response

The current ‘correct’ answer to that question is to use responsive web design, carefully crafted Cascading Style Sheets that strip out the unnecessary and non-compatible elements of each page depending on which device is being used to access it.

Google support this method, and it’s more elegant than a complete site-wide redirect that takes mobile visitors to a significantly reduced version of your site.

However, you should think carefully about what elements of your page will actually work on a mobile device, and which ones need a responsive alternative.

Getting Around

The obvious concern should be navigation. If visitors cannot navigate your site to reach your content, they will leave.

In particular, make text and image links big enough that they are easy to tap on a small touchscreen; and remember that many touchscreen devices have no concept of ‘hover’, so some hyperlink CSS effects and dropdown menus will need to be accounted for in a different way.

A Glass Half Full

Aside from your navigation, you also need to make sure your content is mobile-friendly, and that means keeping Javascript and Flash video files to a minimum.

But this is no bad thing; you can again simply hide those elements with responsive CSS, and make sure you have clear text descriptions to show in their place.

Why is this good? Well, apart from being mobile-friendly, it gives your site plenty of search-visible text, doubling the positive impact of taking this step on your site.

The Personal Touch

The best advice is to take wide-ranging measures with a pinch of salt. You know your website, and your audience, better than anyone (or, at least, you should).

Audit your site’s performance across all the mobile devices you can get your hands on – beg and borrow (but probably don’t steal) devices from friends and colleagues until you’ve tested it on all the leading smartphones and tablets, and all the main mobile operating systems.

Only then will you know for sure which parts work, and which would benefit from the creation of a responsive and cross-platform mobile alternative within your site’s CSS.

Written by Rob Henry

Having had the privilege of providing my search optimisation services to a number of online retailers in the past, I was excited and nervous starting my new job at tonergiant.co.uk. Nervous mainly because I’ve never touched a printer in my life, but I was half expecting it to be like any other ecommerce site I’ve worked on in the past.. How very wrong I was!

Like any other new site I start working on, my first point of call is to look at backlinks.. and sure enough (as with all ecommerce sites I come across these days) there are some ugly, hideous and downright un-holey links. The types of links that make you stop what you’re doing and gauge out your eyes, you know what I’m talking about! Porn sites, link networks, Chinese Viagra sites you name it, I found it.

DISAVOW!

With the links situation dealt temporarily dealt with by webmaster tools disavow, I decided to have a ponder through our analytics and get some background on how your average toner and printer searcher behaves, which lead to some surprising finds. Having had a crash course in printers it came to my attention that the type of toner or ink is very specific to the machine it’s used in, meaning there’s a lot of toner search revolving around brand + model and printer model + toner. To me this signals a complex yet excellent opportunity for SEO strategy involving keyword targeting and relevance boosting to gain rankings thick and fast!

Your average link building or agency strategy is to bombard your homepage with all the links under the sun, so link value filters down through your category and brand structure from the homepage. With toner cartridges and ink being very specific to the machine it means we can bring brand relevancy down to product level, as essentially there is no category level with the site being about ink and toner – the hierarchy is toner > brand or printer > product. Cutting out category level gives us the ability to build deep links at product level bringing brand relevance and authority to both the brand page and the product page. Reversing the link building process back up the hierarchy!

What’s surprising about this is generally ecommerce sites have to share link equity and value with both brand and category page depending on how the site is structured, in our case there is only one line of link value and printers + toner can be treated as a completely separate optimisation project.

The beauty of a specialist ink cartridges website is that you can focus all of your link acquisition efforts into one single sharp spear of keywords, targeting variants of keywords like Epson toner at every level – nuking your relevancy in Google and spreading link equity across the site.

I’m certainly looking forward to implementing my tactics here at tonergiant.co.uk and will keep you all updated with a future blog about my progress and hopefully achievements!

Written by Ryan Holt

Many online retailers adjust their product ranges depending on the season – so why not do the same with your paid search ads?

Taking a look at the cycle of searches in previous years is one way to help spot the recurring trends – and no matter what industry you are in, there are some seasonal cycles that you could probably tap into.

Christmas is an obvious peak period for any retailer, but many leave it until late November to start targeting festive shoppers with offers and tailored landing pages.

But searches including the word ‘Christmas’ begin to rise rapidly as early as October, meaning there’s a good one to two months’ worth of untapped market opportunity for some retailers to exploit.

However, despite the Coca-Cola tagline “holidays are coming”, the run-up to Christmas is actually not the best time to target the keyword ‘holidays’ in your PPC bids.

December is the lowest point of most years for searches relating to ‘holidays’ – which rise rapidly as soon as the new year begins, then peak again in July.

Other, smaller search peaks can fill in some of the gaps – ‘summer’ queries peak, unsurprisingly, in summer, while ‘easter’ sees its peak in March-April, creating a couple of easily targeted advertising opportunities if you have goods suited to either season or event.

Written by Rob Henry

Knowing how to sell goods and services in the fewest possible words is a core skill for PPC advertisers, and it’s worth giving some thought as to how you might go about writing your ad copy.

Remember, when a PPC ad appears, there are just three elements: the headline, the ad copy, and the URL.

None of these offers a huge amount of room for manoeuvre, so you’ll need to master the ancient art of brevity in order to make the most of your share of the screen real estate.

Like a good on-page SEO campaign, optimising ad text is about keywords, but rather than simply trying to cater for what you think people are searching for (that’s where your keyword bids come in), your ad text should work to convince them to click.

Include your most persuasive product benefits – even if they’re not directly product-related, but are related to price, availability or a special offer like free delivery.

On a market stall, you can shout to attract attention, and while you shouldn’t be tempted to use block capitals frivolously online, there’s a reason why acronyms like BOGOF and abbreviations like 2-4-1 are popular as alternatives to typing out ‘buy one, get one free’.

Even your URLs can be optimised – consider placing your landing page at a URL that includes ‘offers’, ‘discounts’ or ‘promotions’ as the parent folder, and you can often sneak an extra persuasive keyword into your ad.

Whatever you decide to do, with so little space to occupy, let every word – and every letter, in some cases – be guided by thoughts of consumer psychology, and of what your customer base are likely to be looking for.

Written by Rob Henry

Which cities search for which cities online? A place name can help refine search results to your local area – but is that more likely to be the searcher’s own location, or somewhere they are planning to go?

Google Trends data gives an insight into the issue, listing in relative terms the cities most likely to search for the designated keyword – including keywords that are, themselves, the names of cities.

If we look at four major British cities – London, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham – some of the results come as little surprise, while others have important lessons to teach us about optimising content for location-specific searches.

London

Unsurprisingly, the UK’s self-centric capital city dominates searches that include the word ‘London’ – even despite the outside interest generated by the London 2012 Olympic Games this year.

For searches conducted within England in 2012, Londoners conducted the most queries containing their own city name.

Even the runners-up are in the same general area, with Wembley, Poplar and Croydon accounting for 72%, 64% and 56% as many searches as those carried out within London itself.

Further down the list, we find major cities elsewhere in the country, including Birmingham and Bristol, who produce 19% as many ‘London’ queries each as the city itself, and Manchester close behind on 17%.

Manchester

If London is led by a closely local search market, then Manchester is even more so – Birmingham produces just 7% as many ‘Manchester’ queries as Manchester itself, while even Londoners only search for the city 12% as often.

By contrast, the most frequent search locations outside of Manchester itself are Sale (81%), Salford (66%) and Stockport (62%) – showing this is a highly defined local search market.

As a result, geographically targeted SEO in the north-west city is arguably a much better prospect for companies targeting local customers with goods and services, as opposed to those trying to attract the tourism trade.

Liverpool

Liverpool, as a city, is a much more clearly defined urban area – and this is reflected in the data, with second-placed St Helens accounting for only 40% as many ‘Liverpool’ queries as the city itself.

Manchester barely makes double figures on 11%, and the remaining search markets for Liverpool-based queries are very small in relative terms – London (8%), Leeds, Sheffield and Birmingham (5%), and Leicester (4%) complete the top ten.

Birmingham

 Birmingham’s relatively central location may explain why it attracts interest both from the north-west and from the south-east, but these again are small markets – Manchester just 5% as many ‘Birmingham’ searches as the city itself, and London just 8%, matching the capital’s interest in Liverpool.

All of the above indicates that the trend towards local search is very much focused on tight regional geographies – people search for the place they are, not for the place they want to be.

It’s a reminder of the transactional nature of the internet, and the desire many searchers have to locate goods, services and entertainment close to home.

Meanwhile, for those in the tourism industry, it seems wise to suggest an intelligent long-tail approach to on-page SEO, as much search traffic is likely to be coupling your place name with a venue, activity or other form of entertainment.

Written by Rob Henry

But ensuring your website ranks highly for relevant nearby search queries can be harder than it sounds – in particular within Google Places results, where distance from the searcher alone is often the deciding factor in determining rankings.

While you can sometimes overcome this by ensuring your Google Places page is as detailed as possible, you might be left wondering whether doing so is a profitable way to spend your time – or your marketing budget.

There are alternatives, however; the most obvious of which is simply to invest more into improving your organic search ranking.

As ‘universal search’ sees more kinds of results vying for position on page one of the SERPs – from local listings to news articles, images and video content – that means fewer organic results are making it on to that first page.

Making it into the top five results, rather than the top ten, could mean the difference between a first and second-page ranking – and could help you to avoid needing to bid on location-specific PPC keywords for the long term.

Written by Rob Henry

What constitutes ‘success’ in a social media campaign? And how can you turn something fairly abstract – the spidery web of messages flying back and forth between you and your customers – into something concrete; something you can display on a graph?

It really depends on what you are trying to achieve. Raw follower/fan numbers indicate rising brand awareness, but if that awareness is all seen in a negative light, it might still not constitute ‘success’.

Here are a couple of more reasonable metrics you can use to decide whether your investment in social media has been worth it or not.

Positive Mentions

Twitter’s Advanced Search options include checkboxes for ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ mentions, based on the inclusion of emoticons in tweets.

Run a search for your brand name, change the URL (up to but not including the first question mark) to http://search.twitter.com/search.rss and subscribe to the feed in any RSS reader.

Do this for negative mentions too, and you have a rough but usable estimate of how often your brand is mentioned in a broadly positive or negative light.

Of course there are third-party tools out there to do this too, but it’s a good place to start.

Buzz-Building

On Twitter, retweets are a way to gauge how well a message has been received, while on Facebook the ‘like’ option does much the same thing.

You might want to set up email alerts for each time you are retweeted – use a message rule to put all of these in a folder together in your email client, and you can quickly see how many retweets you have had overall.

Facebook displays total ‘like’ numbers right there on the page, so it should be easier to see how well your updates are performing.

In either case, consider keeping a running tally of your best-performing updates, so you can use them as the basis for future activities.

Referrals

Finally, think about setting up your analytics software to detect when an inbound click arrives from a social network.

Ultimately, this is probably the number that you’re hoping to drive higher, and you should be able to segregate traffic from social networks as a whole, and from each individual network, making it easier to analyse your social media customers and target them with future marketing messages.

Written by Rob Henry

Social networks have redefined the way people interact online, and the way brands reach out to their customers – but the question of how to run a social media campaign well is one that even the biggest companies still struggle with.

Here’s a handy mnemonic built around ‘social’ itself that will help you to keep track of the fundamentals:

Socialise

At the core of social media is the need to actually socialise – engage with your customers, don’t just broadcast your marketing message at them.

Outreach

It’s not longer necessarily true that “if you build it, they will come”, so make sure you’re reaching out to your customers, but be careful to stop short of intruding too much into their virtual lives.

Clarity

As in other areas of marketing, a clear, concise message helps to avoid customer confusion, so come up with a common thread – or at least a common tone of voice – for all of your status updates and tweets.

Interaction

Responding is more effective than simply broadcasting, so – like with ‘socialise’ and ‘outreach’ – make sure you’re positively engaging with all of your fans and followers.

Approachability

Make sure that you regularly check for incoming messages, and take them in good spirits, even if they appear negative – it’s often possible to turn things around and get some positive PR out of what seemed like a disaster.

Listen

When all else fails, just listen. Listen to what people are saying about your brand, your prices, your special offers.

Whether you just ‘lurk’ without butting in, or try to resolve any problems they may have, showing that you actually care about what your customers have to say is key to succeeding on social networks.

Written by Rob Henry

We have achieved this award as an accreditation to our excellent online marketing services that have been recognised by our clients.

We would like to say a big thank you to all our dedicated employees that have been working hard to ensure all our clients are extremely satisfied with our services.

Thank you to all our clients that have taken the time out to submit our company for this award.

And a big thank you to NetGiant for listing us on their website – feel free to head over to NetGiant and review Online Presence on our own dedicated page!