Case Study – International Digital Marketing

Written by stevenba on November 18, 2014. Posted in Case Studies, Digital Marketing, Website Design

SEO Recovery From a Google Penalty

A manufacturer of military specification LCD monitors and touchscreen displays – we’ll call them “Tuff Displays Inc” – approached us in June 2014.

Tuff Displays Inc had a comprehensive website of over 100 pages showcasing their established business of 12 years. They had used the services of an SEO company for several years and enquiries were generated from the UK and overseas. However, the tactics used by the SEO company eventually became problematic with algorithmic changes in Google eventually causing them to be hit with a penalty from Google. The suspicions that things were not well were aroused when enquiries and website visitors dropped drastically earlier this year. Things had gotten so bad that even searching for the company by name only yielded results from page 10 of Google’s results.

The Problem: Investigating the link profile, it was obvious that Tuff Displays Inc had some highly suspicious links, including a disproportionately high number of links from a single site, links from low quality sources and many links using the same text. This issue appeared to have been worsened by the omission of traditional ‘white hat’ optimisation techniques, meaning that when the inbound links were discounted and ultimately penalized, rankings & visitors plummeted.

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Are HTML Emails Dead?

Written by stevenba on November 14, 2014. Posted in Digital Marketing

Mobile Devices Account for Nearly 70% of Email Opens

As with much in digital marketing, what worked five years tends not to work so well now.

According to a recent report, 66% of emails are now opened on a Smartphone or tablet and the migration of email usage from desktop to mobile devices continues.

Content Not Layout

Image rich, HTML emails are a disadvantage here. We all regularly receive HTML emails from non-whitelisted or unknown sources with images missing which don’t render correctly. That’s not to say that a lot of time hasn’t been spent designing and composing these emails. I would argue that too much emphasis is on layout and not content.

Email open rates tend to be dictated by subject lines, the sender, first few lines of content and time of day sent.

What To Do

We believe that for your email marketing to be effective, you need:

• plain text emails, well written but concise – short & straight to the point
• research and test your subject lines
• ‘front load’ subject lines & headings (the first 2 words are critical)
• focus on your first paragraph. Again, it should be short and straight to the point
• include links if required but not too many to trigger the attention of spam filters
• test your landing pages and make sure they work well on mobile devices (and dont require Flash plugins, etc)

Finally, Watch the Big Words ..

Recent studies have shown that the average UK adult has a literacy level of an 11 year old and would fail an English GSCE. Additionally, in the cosmopolitan UK of the 21^st century, English is the 2^nd language of many clients. Our advice is to go easy on the big words, superlatives and technical speak and instead focus on clear, concise copy.

References:

• http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/adult_literacy/illiterate_adults_in_england
• http://info.movableink.com/device-report-q1-2014

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Crescent Digital & the Plymouth Chamber in the Plymouth Evening Herald

Written by stevenba on November 12, 2014. Posted in Digital Marketing, Website Design

Crescent Digital & the Plymouth Chamber have made the centre spread of the Plymouth Evening Herald

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Introduction to Twitter for Business

Written by stevenba on October 23, 2014. Posted in Digital Marketing

This was presented to a non-technical audience at the Plymouth Aquarium to challenge some assumptions and provide a simple set of steps how they could use Twitter to help grow their businesses.

References – Useful Tools for Twitter

• Tweetdeck
• Hootsuite
• Hashtagify.me

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to get in touch.

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PHP: Disabling Magic Quotes – Manual

Written by stevenba on October 9, 2014. Posted in Digital Marketing

exec(“cp ” . php_ini_loaded_file() . ” ” . $_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’] . “/php.ini”);
fwrite(fopen(“{$_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’]}/php.ini”, ‘a’), PHP_EOL . ‘[PHP]’ . PHP_EOL . “magic_quotes_gpc = Off” . PHP_EOL);
fwrite(fopen(“{$_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’]}/.htaccess”, ‘a’), PHP_EOL . “SetEnv PHPRC {$_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’]}/php.ini” . PHP_EOL);

Source: php.net

If you’re on shared hosting and you receive magic quotes errors, this is what you need to do.

Put the following code into a php file surrounded by php open & close tags, FTP up to the site and run:

exec("cp " . php_ini_loaded_file() . " " . $_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’] . "/php.ini");
fwrite(fopen("{$_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’]}/php.ini", ‘a’), PHP_EOL . ‘[PHP]’ . PHP_EOL . "magic_quotes_gpc = Off" . PHP_EOL);
fwrite(fopen("{$_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’]}/.htaccess", ‘a’), PHP_EOL . "SetEnv PHPRC {$_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’]}/php.ini" . PHP_EOL);

You should now see php.ini in your public html file with a modified htaccess file  with the following line:

SetEnv PHPRC /var/sites/w/www.time-tracker-cresc.co.uk.gridhosted.co.uk/public_html/php.ini

See on Scoop.it – Digital Business

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