Another Way to Advertise your Business for FREE!

Another way to advertise your business for FREE!

Many people don’t know about this feature on eBay but they offer local services feature, where you can create an ad, just like the standard auction listings but for your business.

All you need is an eBay account and you can creating a standard ad that allows you to input Title’s, Prices such as how much per hour, your business working hours, contact details and a space to write your ad. The ad appears for 28day’s which is good for the price of nothing.

Your can also pay the normal eBay charges to upgrade your ad with gallery images, featured and bold titles etc.

For the people searching they can select local Services from the main drop down menu and then sort by location, which makes it idea if you’re looking for local business. After all what have you got to lose? – eBay Local Services

Google Street Maps

Recently I stumbled across a Google street maps function and thought it was worth a mention.

Google Maps now comes with street view function in certain areas, a feature that you may not have heard of unless you happened to press a random button when using Google maps.
The idea of it is that you can walk down a street and view everything at that level; allowing you to see all the buildings, parks, people, busses etc It currently includes the major cities and some of the famous landmarks and touristic highlights, which could come in handy! It’s defiantly a feature to keep an eye out for in the future.

You can see the how to use guide here.

Adding Links to a External Joomla Menu

Step 1:

From your control panel click on the “menu Manager” icon

Find the menu you wish to edit, which is called “External Links” in the example, then just right of this under the “menu items” column click on the small icon as shown in the image below.

Once clicked it will display a list of all your current links, to create a new link click on the “new” icon at the top right of the page.

Once the page has loaded from the menu type click on the “external link” option.

Now you can fill in all the details for your new link. Under the link always add the “http://” to the start of the link and for the “On Click, Open in:” select “new window with browser Navigation” so that it opens in a new window and doesn’t take them away from your site. Once completed click on save. (See image below)

Joomla – Uploading and linking different types of files such as PDF’s

Step 1:
From your control panel click on the “media manager” icon.

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At the bottom of the page you will see a place to browse for the PDF, Click on the browse button and you can now navigate to the file.
Once you have selected your file click on the “start upload” button. Once it’s completed the file will appear in the space above.

Step 2:

Now go to the article manager from your main control panel and edit the wall insulation page and highlight the text that you wish to link and then click on the link icon. On the pop up you can now change the URL to:

/images/yourfilename.pdf

And finally save changes. (Images is the default location where everything is uploaded to via the media manager.)

Site Promotion

One of the best ways to first promote your site is not always through expensive advertising campaigns on the internet but is to add your website address to all your flyers and business cards or if your selling products to your product packaging. Other places to think about is on your work van / car and work signs. Even having it on a t-shirt can help!

More often that not people will look for people’s websites before phoning them up to get a better idea of what they want and what you can offer instead of the phoning up and being talked into something they didn’t want, so its always worth getting your flyers/business cards updated as soon as you have your website made.

Link Building

So you want to start to get some more traffic to your site and to get it ranked higher?

Link building is a valuable resource in helping to direct more traffic to your site and you should start by creating or getting a links page created for your site.

Before you begin on link building you should know this is one of the harder points in SEO and takes alot more time and should not expect results within a few days but a few months. The aim is to build up some high quality inbound links to your website.

You should starting by finding other similar websites that have some relation to your website that you think would be useful such as if your selling books another book store offering different kinds of books could be a good source of traffic. Writing them a quick email asking if they would place your link on their website and in return you will place their link on your links page if the first thing to do but many people ingore the bot generated emails so always avoid this sort.  Also always check to see if they have already a “submit a link” page where you can add your link first, to save emailing them.

Other places to add your website link is business directory’s there is many directory’s that you can add your link to for free is a good source of tariff. Doing a quick search for business directory’s on any major search engine will bring back lots of results of sites you could get your link added to.

There is many other places and service that you can add your website to for a cost but before doing this always check to see how many people are already listed and if it can really be beneficial to you and your business. An example of this type is the yellow pages you should try and stay away from people who offer ” a page rank 6 link at $33″  most of these wount help your site.

Things to remember when requesting and adding reciprocal links:

• Its better to add your link to sites that have some relation to yours in some way otherwise you could get alot of tariff but none of it of any use.
• The better quality of the site you add your link to will give you better weight with search engines. For an example a site that’s ranked on the first page of Google and has 1,000 hits a day is much better than 5 sites ranked on the 80th page of Google that gets 10 hits day.

If you have any questions or other ways in link building please leave a comment.

AdsFlip .. Advertise your website for free!.. Free Traffic!

AdsFlip a new service recently launched by iwebtools that is well known for its web master tools now offers you a chance to join their advertising network for free and earn 1000 free credits on sign-up!

How it works

You sign-up to their website and place an ad on your website that looks very similar to Google ads and every time your page is loaded showing an ad, Adsflip will give you 1 credit!

That’s how simple it is!

You can then also create an ad and choose which category your website fits into such as “Internet” and then add your keywords, URL etc
Once complete you can then assign how many of your credits you would like to give to your ad and that’s it, it will now show on all content related websites untill your credits balance is 0. ( in which time you have made more from your site)

Advantages to your site:

• Promoting your site to loads of sites!

• Extra traffic!

• And best of all its free!

Its still in its beta stage so there is bound to be a few bugs but I would recommend get signed up and get some free traffic!

URL: http://www.adsflip.com/

Adsflip:

A Quick Guide to SEO

What is SEO?

For those of your that don’t know SEO stands for search engine optimisation in the basic sense of the word, making your site more search engine friendly so it can find your pages better and hopefully increase your weight with serach engines in turn bringing more traffic.

What does it involve doing?

There are a few sides to SEO but the main things involved that need to be optimised in your websites are:

1. title i.e. Anything that’s between <title> and </title> in your pages head tags. For an example

Yoursite.com – Welcome to this Great Books Website

2. Your websites Meta description. Example:

<meta name=”description” content=”Great stores is based in the UK and provides great books and great prices!” />

3. Your websites keywords, Example:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”books, affordable prices”>

4. Finally submitting your site to quality sites.

How can I optimise my site?

 
- <!–[endif]–>Meta Title:

 To start, think about the keywords you would like to be listed for and what words you think people type in search engines that relate to your website.

In this example we sell books but “books” by its self is a very common search term we will need to be more specific if we want to rank high. So let’s take “affordable Books”.

Now we have the keyword you must try and fit it into your Meta title, things to remember when placing keywords:

Positioning – placement of the keyword can be important try and place it towards the front and not at the end!

Length – don’t make your title to long.

So ours is now: Yoursite.com – Affordable books at the Great book store, UK

<!–[if !supportLists]–>- <!–[endif]–>Meta Description

Your description is also very important try and places your search keywords toward the front of your description. Also try and create an informative but short description with everything that is appealing. More and more people will read the description in google and then click on the link,  if they like what they read rather than just clicking on the number 1 site.

Things to remember:

Don’t go over 200 characters as Google won’t show much more past this.

- <!–[endif]–>Meta keywords

Keywords need to follow the pattern you have created you should add the main keyword you want people to search for near to the front as you have done before. To find out what keywords you may benefit from one option is to view the source of other websites that rank top 10 in the search engines and check their keywords! Although keywords are becoming less of a factor but always worth adding.

- <!–[endif]–>Link Submitting

Check Out the Link on the right.

Final thought

Hopefully this has given you a brief insight into SEO and how to go about optimising your pages. There are many different opinions and ways of optimisation but this will give you a step in the right direction.

Please leave your comments and thoughts and SEO success with any different techniques.

Web Design, Website Design Cornwall – 1clickwebdesigns.co.uk

Why have we made this blog?

You maybe or may not know that creating a blog is one of the best things you can do to promote any website. Not only does it mean that it can be crawled by Google and the major search engines it also means that your websites weight will increase in turn bringing more targeted traffic to your site.

I have seen many small businesses create blogs that are ranked higher than their own websites, 1clickwebdesigns.co.uk supports the idea of blogs and suggest to all our customers that creating a blog is a worthwhile in promoting your business.

What do we do?

1clickwebdesigns.co.uk provides affordable website design in Cornwall and across the UK. We have several packages from 1 page websites that are ideal if your business is new to the web and you’re just looking to make your web presence felt. From just £89.99 with free web hosting and free domain name this is a popular package.

We also offer larger sites and content management system using joomla, which provides greater functionality and is highly customisable providing you a great site looking site that can be updated and controlled by you.

All the packages can be totally customised to suit these needs of each individual business specification and many extras can be included such as PHP/MYSQl scripting for dynamic sites, Logo Design and search engine optimisation see our main website for more info.

We understand that the primary aim of having a business website is to make money and all our sites are designed with this goal in mind. For more information including a free quote and a demo design please visit our website.

www.1clickwebdesigns.co.uk