I’ve been roped in to the 40 mile ride and seriously need to start some kind of training!

Basildon Rotary Bike Ride 2010 Poster

More to come on this from the Cycles UK blog very soon

Sales up considerably on last years promotion across the 16 stores and website

The Offer:
£50 off any womens bike

Here’s what we did:

I put together some graphic work to be used for the promo…

We then used this graphic on:

• Posters for all shop windows
• Website homepage promotion on our carousel (Nice big hero image)
• Pushed out to all our affiliates who reacted very well by promoting on their websites
• Februarys E-newsletter to our customer base

Here’s some poster artwork of the the big (January) sale I created for Cycles UK this month. For the sale we’ve got these posters up in every store and re-created the bikes wheel disc design for real so the bikes on sale stand out in store.

Online I’ve done web banner versions of the sale posters, created special sale categories and made our December E-newsletter all about the sale.

I’m pleased with the marketing we’ve done on this (our biggest ever) sale even if the snow has put people off buying bikes at the moment!

What I’ve listed below is just a starting point and is my summary of what Google are advising us makes a good search engine optimised website.

Create unique, accurate page titles

Make UNIQUE page titles! If you have duplications in your page titles Google will assume you are duplicating the content of you’re website. Which is not good…

The format I use generally is:

[Main keyword of page] | [Secondary keywords] | [Website or company name]

As on Cycles UK’s website:

Mountain bikes | Shop for bikes online or in store | Cycles UK

Description meta tags

Google ‘might’ use these so it’s definitely worth making sure they are in place. No need to repeat your keywords or do lists of keywords. Just show useful information about the page it relates to. As with titles, make sure they are all unique and relevant… Easy.

Structure of your URLs

With URLs it’s always best to use keywords, not numbers. A good structure would be:

http://www.cyclesuk.com/mountain-bikes/full-suspension

Not

http://www.cyclesuk.com/108/447920

At Cycles UK I’ve realised we don’t quite do this as good as it could be so ‘improve URL structure’ has gone on my to-do list!

A good tip is the use of a dash (-). Rather than ‘/mountainbikes’ or ‘/mountain_bikes’, use the dash ‘/mountain-bikes’ instead. When Google crawls your URL it will split words up however you present them but other search engines may not be so advanced. The general standard for splitting these words up is a dash although if your URLs don’t use them it’s not worth changing. I think it’s easier to read as well.

Site navigation

The basics here is always have text html links somewhere on the page. If you have to have a menu made from images, repeat the menu in the footer as pure text. Breadcrumbs are also very useful both for the user and for search engines to crawl.

Content

The content of a website is the most important element. It’s essential not to get bogged down in SEO by trying to work out keyword density and potentially making a page unreadable for the sake of getting higher up the search engines. If you’re writing about about a specific subject, the search engines will be able to pick up on what is relevant on the page as long as you’re not tackling too many subjects per page. Just stick to the subject of the page and be useful and relevant.

Anchor text

Using keywords in your anchor text (the text a user click on) is a great way of letting the search engines know the relevance of a link. So steer clear of writing your anchor text with terms like ‘click here’ and ‘read more’. Instead go for descriptive keywords. If your linking to mountain bikes then instead of:

For more information about our mountain bikes click here

Go for something more like:

Find out more about our range of mountain bikes

Heading Tags

The html Heading tags (<h1> <h2> <h3> etc…) have a great deal of importance for SEO in determining the subject and relevance of a page for the search engines.

<h1> most important. For example: <h1>Bicycles</h1>

Then <h2>. For example: <h2>Mountain bikes</h2>

Then <h3>. For example: <h3>Hardtail mountain bikes</h3>

And so on…

Personally I think you should try and only have one <h1> tag per page for maximum relevance although in practice I find this rarely happens. It certainly doesn’t on our CyclesUK website (something else on my to-do list!). What often happens is that due to CCS styling, menu headers are set as <h1> tags which means you lose relevance.

Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide is a must read. Even if you’re experienced in SEO, it’s worth reminding yourself of the SEO best practices within it’s pages.

What does ‘real time’ mean?
As the world is tweeting, updating a Facebook status, submitting a wiki, news article, blogging etc on the web, you can have it right there and relevant to your search as it happens. This is hugely significant for the way users use Google and how the marketeers will sell on it…

What does this mean for search engine marketing?
Up to now it’s been difficult for online marketeers to justify spending too much time on social media to promote a business. Facebook and Twitter have found it hard to monitise their sites as users really aren’t looking to make a purchase. They’re socialising.

Now real time search is fully integrated into the main Google search engine results pages (SERPs), people searching for products will get real time social network search results well as the business listings, adwords ads and organic results.

Any links you include in your Twitter updates for example, are fully click-able in the SERPs which is great for anyone with something to say (or sell).

As it stands most of the updates you get are Twitter based (and blog and news articles) but Facebook and Myspace are on board and will be live soon.

What does this mean for search engine optimisation?
What I think this means for SEO is that all our hard efforts to make web pages relevant and SEO friendly have taken another blow as they could in all possibility be below the fold even if it ranks well.

I did a search for ‘climate change’ and the first organic and non timely or social networked result is the BBC, way down the page after three adwords ads, the latest news results and the real time search results. Obviously it depends on what your search is but it’s worth thinking about how this evolution in search affects the industry nonetheless…

How Falmer will look

There’s many of us who have been dreaming of seeing the Albion in that shiny new sports complex and the web cam provided by www.seagulls.co.uk that’s permanently on site really makes the dream a reality.

I’m checking back every few days to see Falmer take shape. Even if all I see new is a girder in place that wasn’t there before…

View of Falmer stadium

This image of BHAFC’s new ground yesterday afternoon from the Falmer web cam show something resembling a stand and some roof! The Falmer-cam (as it should be called) updates with a still image every 15 minutes which is great.

A live stream would have been better, but  a new stadium a decade ago would have been too, so no complaints…

Up the Albion and good luck to Poyet in his first game in charge of the Seagulls at Southampton tomorrow.

Check out the Falmer web cam

Producing a band interview was definitely one of the hardest projects of my time at Miggle. The problems lay with getting everyone in the right place, prepared with questions, camera equipment and themselves at the same time.

We re-arranged several times over Christmas 2008 and finally got Brighton band Transformer into Ponana nightclub for recording in January ‘09. As far as creating a professional, sleek video? I think we did OK.

MSN Video took up the up the video and Miggle got to show what we could do with video content on the web!

Transformer – Interview

I should credit all those involved in making the Transformer interview as everyone was highly professional and made me look like a good Associate Producer!

Lee – For his skilled directing and editing
Jess Hamil – For taking to interviewing so brilliantly and effortlessly
Gemma Nelson – For letting us use Ponana
Alick – For financing the project

About me:

I'm on the edge of a brilliant idea here...

• I’m a Brightonian living in Wickford, Essex
• I’m Website and Marketing Manager for Cycles UK
• I get quite geeky and excited about SEO, SEM and general e-commerce type web stuff
• I’m thinking about getting a guinea pig