4 ways to grow your business

Are you wondering how to grow your business and develop it in a way so it’s not wholly reliant on you? Have you considered outsourcing/franchising/productising as a way to achieve that growth? Emma Jones outlines the options with tips for each strategy.

Grow, grow, grow!

Fellow business owners will understand when I say having a business often feels like having a child; you conceived the idea, you nurtured the business in its early stages, and it can feel tough to let it go and grow on its own! There are smart ways to scale your business and here are four of them.

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Posted by Guest Blogger in Business Skills, Guest Blogs on May 24th, 2010| 1 Comment »

?fbc_channel=1 has started appearing in Google Analytics

This is an annoying problem that many Google Analytics users are encountering at the moment; read on for how to get rid of it.

If you are new to Google analytics you may find our Google Analytics training in Brighton, Sussex, useful, if you know the basics then we offer Advanced Google Analytics Training, SEO Training, WordPress Training and Social Media Training.

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Posted by Heather Buckley in SEO, Social Media on May 14th, 2010| 7 Comments »

How to Stop Google.com redirecting to Google.co.uk

Sometimes you may want to view search results on Google.com instead of Google.co.uk – which you’re automatically redirected to if you live in the UK. This is useful to get different information, or to see how you’re ranking for certain keywords across the Atlantic. Well we had this problem recently and can share with you how to escape being redirected! You just need a short addition to the URL: enter “www.google.com/ncr” into the browser address bar… and Bob’s your uncle!

Find out all you need to know about Google+ HERE

To learn about optimising your website for search, see our new re-vamped SEO Training at Silicon Beach Training in Brighton, Sussex.

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Posted by Heather Buckley in New Free Resources on April 21st, 2010| 6 Comments »

Done well, a targeted e-mail campaign with links to your site can be an extremely effective and inexpensive sales tool. Once sent, it’s important to be able to track how successful your e-mail campaign has been. Thankfully, Google Analytics provides a simple and effective way to track the traffic. If you don’t already have a Google Analytics account, you can learn how to set one up (and a lot more besides) on our Google Analytics training course. Google also have a guide to installing Analytics here. We also offer a great Email Marketing Training in Brighton, Sussex, if you need to learn how to put together a campaign.

Once you’ve got Google Analytics set up, this simple step by step guide will enable you to track all of the traffic from the links in your e-mail.

Google Analytics EMail Tracking – 5 Step Guide:

OK – so you’ve written your e-mail and you’re ready to add links to the text and images that you hope will drive hordes visitors to your site.

Step 1)

Before you add any links at all to your e-mail, your need to generate special modified URLs that will enable Google Analytics to track how many people follow them (and what they do afterwards). To do this, you need to visit the Google Analytics URL Builder

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Posted by Andy Trainer in New Free Resources, SEO, Social Media on February 8th, 2010| 5 Comments »

Like it or not the Google Caffeine update is upon us – some speculate that Google’s new algorithm is already live on some servers. The Caffeine update is changing the way Google delivers its results, so if you haven’t already, you need to make sure your site is Caffeine-ready! Our “5 Top Tips for Optimising Your Site for Google Caffeine” already summarises how engaging more in Social Media will help you perform better in Caffeine. (See our SEO Training in Brighton, Sussex, to learn more about search).

Because of the increased use of mobiles for web-browsing, Google is also trying to make the web faster – and one of the factors affecting how well you’re going to rank is how fast your site loads.

So – if you’ve got a slow old pig of a website it’s time to pull your finger out and do something about it!

How to make your pages load faster

Don’t know where to start? Here’s our 5 top tips to speed up your site for Caffeine:

1. Analyse your current speed

Before you do anything you need to see how fast (or slow) your site is loading now. You might find you’re already fine! In any case, you’ll want to set a benchmark so that you can see the effect of the improvements you’re about to make.

Use http://tools.pingdom.com/ to find out how fast your site loads. This is one of the more useful site speed tools as it saves your previous results, so you can track your performance over time.

Google haven’t put a number on how fast your page will need to load to rank well (it’s algorithm will be a lot more complex than just a number of seconds!) – however, putting Google to one side for a minute – from a “real people” usability point of view, longer than 5-8 seconds load time and users are going to give up – so if you’re coming in over 5 you’re already in big trouble!

Another useful speed test can be found at http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/ which provides quite a detailed breakdown of each element of your site, and what can be improved…

So – how do we fix things?

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Posted by Andy Trainer in New Free Resources, SEO, Social Media, Web Design on January 25th, 2010| 2 Comments »

The Google announcement this week about personalised search has created quite a stir. Those who already have a google account will be aware of how your previous search activity effects your current search results. Previously when checking the position of keywords in Google we needed to sign out before getting results uneffected by personalised search.

If you are interested in how Social Media can have a positive effect on your search engine ranking you may be interested in our our 1 day Social Media Ccourse. In addition, we now run a leading edge Search Engine Optimisation Training course – take a look at our new outline!

Now Google will use a cookie that will effect all searches wether you are logged in or not. The only way to disallow google from personalising searches in future will be to disable the cookie and/or clear the web history:

Turning off search personalization

Because personalised search treats signed-in and signed-out users differently, the instructions for disabling Personalized Search are different for each case. Read more to learn how to turn off personalised searches in Google. Read the rest of "Google Personalised Search Results – How to turn them off"

Posted by Heather Buckley in New Free Resources, SEO, Social Media, Web Design on December 9th, 2009| 1 Comment »

Need to learn more about Google? See our SEO Training in Brighton, Sussex.

Today Google is allowing access to its new search engine, codenamed Caffeine. Google has already started to implement changes and will continue to do so over a period of time, whilst making changes based on feedback.

Caffeine will have a huge effect on businesses who have relied on organic search engine ranking for traffic and for Search Engine Optimisation companies who will have to rethink their strategies.

Posted by Heather Buckley in News, SEO on August 12th, 2009| No Comments »