Are you brave enough to zip slide across the hallowed turf of the Bristol City Football Club, all in the name of Charity! Definitely a heart racing experience!

Last week we spent some time with the guys over at Deafblind UK helping them plan their online marketing campaigns with a view to increasing their exposure in the online space.

Whilst we were there they were telling us about their Zip Slide Event taking place at Bristol City Football Club on Sunday 5th April 2009. The event looks fantastic and as it’s all in a good cause, we thought we would help spread the word.

Could You Take Up The Challenge?

Are you a Bristol City fan, or someone who who wants to push the boundaries in 2009? Or is your Department at work looking for an alternative team building experience? Whatever your motivation; join us for this thrilling adventure!

You need to be aged 18 and over to participate, (or over 14 years old and accompanied by a parent or guardian) and be in good general health. You also need to try and raise a minimum of £100 for Deafblind UK.

Our Pledge

In order to help Deafblind UK with their event, The Little Search Company will sponsor anybody who signs up £20 to kick start your fundraising campaign.

Be sure to tell Deafblind UK you saw our post when signing up and drop me an email: paul@thelittlesearchcompany.com and we’ll be more than happy to arrange our sponsorship with you.

It’s a great cause, their doing great work and at the end of the day, would u rather be zipping across the turf of Bristol city Football Club in a few weeks time, or sitting at your computer… again.

For more information contact:

Kelly Frew on:

Email: kelly.frew@deafblind.org.uk
Tel: 01733 358 100 (Voice/Text) - Extension 284

Now that Christmas is out of the way it’s time for us to start thinking about Valentines Day, hence we are looking for merchants to promote over this period on our site: Gifts Guide UK

Also looking for Valentines Day banners - 468 x 60. If you do have any give us a shout as keen to change over the Xmas banners a.s.a.p.

For other ways to get involved with the site check out:
Retailers - Get Involved | Gifts Guide UK

Over the last few weeks I’ve completed a number of SEO appraisals for our clients and there’s one critical thing that seems to be omitted from the majority of sites i’ve been looking at - the Sitemap.

A sitemap is simply a page or set of pages that lists all of the pages on your website. If you have a small site the sitemap can be contained to one page, however if you have a large site then it might be necessary to break it down into a number of categories.

The sitemap allows users and more importantly the search engines to find all of the pages on your website in one place, increasing the chances of your pages getting indexed whilst pointing some good anchor text rich internal links at your pages.

If you’ve never seen a sitemap before, here’s quite a simple example:

http://www.giftsguideuk.com/site-map/

There’s no excuse for not having a sitemap, so if you don’t have one, take 20 minutes out to create one now!

With all the festive spirit going around at the moment we are pleased to announce the launch of our new project: Gifts Guide UK

Some of you will know I have spent some time working in the gifts industry so this won’t be entirely unexpected from the people who know me. I’m pleased to be stepping over to the dark side and am looking to build relationships with retailers to help really make this site move.

I’ve put together a guide for how retailers can get involved with us, if you are a gift retailer or simply sell products you think we might like to feature, have a look through and drop us a line if you’d like to be involved.

You can find the guide here: http://www.giftsguideuk.com/retailers-get-involved/

My email: paul@thelittlesearchcompany.com

December 8th is a date all affiliates and retailers should be penning into their diaries, because this is the date predicted by the IMRG of the busiest online shopping day of the year for 2008, with the busiest hour being between the hours of 1-2pm if we want to be precise.

IMRG estimate that £320m will be spent online on 8th December with a forecast that UK shoppers will spend £13.16bn on the Internet in the last quarter of 2008. 42% of sales are expected to occur outside of traditional trading hours, before 9am or after 6pm.

If these predictions are hit, then this will be an increase of over 15% against the same period last year, though growth would be down against the 54% rise we saw last year.

With this in mind we’ve put together a checklist for retailers and affiliates alike to help see you through the festive season:

• If you haven’t already, start increasing your PPC budgets as traffic will be increasing rapidly from here on in and your budgets will burn out a lot quicker.
• Advertise your last order dates. This is essential to give customers peace of mind that they will receive their gifts in time for Christmas.
• Tis the season for promotions, with the credit crunch in full force everybody’s looking for the bargains, make sure your promotions stand out.
• Think about when your going to land your emails into your databases inbox. Lunch times are a great time to land them as office workers do their “personal surfing”.
• It’s now November 25th, exactly one month away from Christmas Day and if you haven’t already delivered Christmas marketing materials (banners / emails / incentives, etc) to your affiliates it’s a pretty poor show, so get them done by the end of the day!
• Never underestimate the option to Gift Wrap at this time of year. The majority of gift merchants offer this as a standard however if your promoting a merchant that doesn’t as an affiliate, you could be missing out on extra commissions.
• Replace “Gift Wrap” with “Gift Vouchers” from the last point, don’t underestimate how popular these are!
• Did you load test your server this year? What happens if tomorrow your traffic increases 10 fold, could you cope? We see this year after year, sites going down because they haven’t properly prepared for the extra traffic they are receiving. Make sure this doesn’t happen to you!

We hope this gives you some food for thought at least, if you have some tips of your own you would like to share feel free to add them as a comment, we’ll add the best ones to this post with a credit to you.

This week saw Google launch their “starter guide to search engine optimisation”, a comprehensive 22 page document that covers all the website basics to help new webmasters rank better within their search engine.

The guide covers improving Meta title and description tags, URL structure’s, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and lots more.

Whilst none of the Google “secret sauce” is revealed if your looking for a place to start with SEO, (other than hiring us of course) you couldn’t go far wrong by starting here.

Kudos to Google, you’ll find their guide here:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html

It wasn’t long ago I blogged about my team having far too much time on thier hands as they seem to be launching new projects day and night. In a passing conversation I mentioned how nice it would be to launch our own SEO tool suite, and low and behold today I recieved a link to a pretty nifty tool indeed:

The Little Search Company Keyword Typo Tool

This isn’t an original tool in terms of concept, however I do feel we’ve managed to improve on what is kicking around online already.

Every day hundreds upon thousands of misspelt searches are entered within the search engines and they are the perfect way to pick up additional traffic.

Pay Per Click

If your running a PPC campaign then bidding on misspelt keywords can be a low cost option to picking up additional traffic that your competitors may well be missing out on.

SEO

The best place to put misspelt keywords is in the META keyword tag. This tag was spammed to death during the 90’s and search engines like Google no longer give any major weight it, it is however a perfect place to put in misspelt keywords that you obviously don’t ant appearing on your page.

I hope you find the keyword typo tool useful and I have a feeling that this is only the start of our SEO Tools section, so be sure to keep an eye out for future announcements.

When I read the post on the A4U forum tonight that Play.com have decided to remove MyVoucherCodes.co.uk from their affiliate program “with immediate effect”, I had to ask myself what their motivations were for announcing this to the general affiliate community.

Now before we go on let’s get one thing straight, Play’s decision to remove MyVoucherCodes from their affiliate program is their own and im not arguing for or against this decision, my concern is about the way their agency have publicised it.

I spent almost 3 years managing the affiliate program for IWOOT and my understanding of our affiliate channel was that this is business, and some things in business should stay between the involved parties. This is not a group of youths seeing who can p*** highest up the wall, this is a multi £million (£billion?) industry and the integreties of business should remain the same.

Whilst at IWOOT I had the unfortunate pleasure of removing a number of affiliates from our campaign, some for promoting the site alongside adult content, others for breaching PPC terms and conditions and bidding on brand and for a wealth of other reasons. But at no time did we ever announce this fact on our blog or on the A4U forum …   We did name and shame merchants who were leaching off the brand terms, but as we wern’t in business with these people and they were taking liberties, it’s a bit of a different situation.

When a merchant accepts an affiliate onto thier program, a business relationship is formed and in my own opinion, the integrities of a business relationship should exist, Confidentiality and Professionalism being amongst them….

And that brings me full circle to what the motivations were for Play.com’s agency to announce this removal to the affiliate community. If MVC are removed from their program then theres more chance cookies will survive customers heading off during the checkout stage to find a voucher code, given the timing of the announcement (peak xmas period) it would appear this announcement is little more than to gain favour amongst the majority of the affiliate industry, by telling them what they have been crying out to hear for the last few months.

My personal opinion is that this should have remained behind closed doors and play.com could do with hiring MyVoucherCodes PR agency to look over future announcements, it’s just not very professional at all.

We are pleased to announce that football shirts and sportswear retailer Subside Sports have appointed The Little Search Company to handle its natural search engine optimisation campaign.

Subside Sports is one of the biggest online retailers of football shirts and ship worldwide with localised domains for UK, US, France, Germany and Canada. The site prides itself on having the largest collection of football shirts anywhere in the world, from Real Madrid to the Tibetan National Team.

As part of a full service SEO agreement for all regional domains, The Little Search Company will be responsible for development of the website architecture from a search perspective, keyword research, link building, keyword translation, competitor analysis and delivering ongoing search consultancy.

We are currently looking to recruit an SEO Assistant to join our team whose role will involve supporting the Head Of Search with managing our clients search engine optimisation campaigns.

The Little Search Company are specialists in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM). With over 18 years combined search engine optimisation experience, our small yet dedicated team live and breathe search on a daily basis, allowing us to keep you ahead of the competition.

You’ll find that our training and development are second to none, and we’re committed to investing in your future.We’re a small team that shares our knowledge on a daily basis and where nobody pulls rank in the decision making process. if at the end of the day you haven’t learn’t something new, we’d feel we’ve failed an employer.

Candidate Requirements

•  The successful candidate will possess a thorough understanding of search engines
•  SEO guidelines and the latest SEO techniques. 
•  Previous experience in the development and implementation of SEO strategies.
•  Experience of online press releases, article submission and RSS feeds.
•  Experience in analysing code and a strong understanding of SEO principles.

Your Day To Day Will Entail:

•  Assisting in the production of SEO optimised landing pages.
•  Analysing of anchor text links.
•  Construction of unique copy for targeted pages.
•  Assist in the development of SEO best practise guidelines and training when required.
•  Implementation of link building strategy.
•  Submission of online press releases and other articles including optimised content syndication.

Skills You Possess:

•  Hands on experience in SEO, PPC and/or search marketing
•  A high level of attention to detail
•  High degree of numeracy and experience of analysing performance
•  An understanding of HTML
•  Good written communication skills

You’ll Have:

•  Confidence in your own abilities and self-motivation
•  Strong interpersonal / communication skills
•  Meticulous attention to detail
•  Organisation skills, coordinating multiple projects to strict deadlines
•  Enthusiasam and client focused
•  A love of beer and poker (no pros allowed!)

This role is located at our new offices based in Peterborough City Centre, Salery is dependant upon experience however we’ll offer a competitive package for the right person.

Too apply for this role please forward your CV along with a covering letter detailing why you feel you are right for this role to paul@thelittlesearchcompany.com