Yellow Jersey Web Design

Why we love WordPress

Brad — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 12:31:20 +0000

A few years ago we at Yellow Jersey Design started experimenting with an up and coming open source software script called WordPress. We created a few sites for customers using WordPress and have never looked back.

Today 95% of our projects are built on a wordpress platform. It is versatile and user friendly and allows us to create fabulous websites for our clients at a fraction of the cost.

It is open source which means hundreds of people across the world are working it, creating plugins, adding functionality. It is constantly evolving, growing, getting better.

We love wordpress!

Have a look at some of our latest wordpress sites:

Alliance Reporting Solutions
The Vetrano Group
Eric the Trainer Sumo

SEO Tip

admin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:22:44 +0000

Think local.

It’s very hard to compete with the millions of websites on the world wide web but how about just competing with businesses in your town.

Including your town as one of your optimized keywords and entering your business’s info on local directories can go a long way to helping you be found by your local customers.

Conversions are key in website optimisation

admin — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 10:37:14 +0000

When you enter the world of search engine optimization there are so many stats that suddenly become important to you:

Unique visits to your website
Page Rank
Page Views

It can all become overwhelming and essentially distracting.

The most important thing to keep in mind as you plan and implement your seo plans is:

What am I trying to achieve, what constitutes a conversion to me?

This should be both the starting point and the goal of your campaign. For some a telephone call or the completion of the contact form would be considered a successful conversion. For others, signing up for their monthly newsletter or registering for a course. Those with ecommerce sites would be aiming for a sale.

Once you know your goal, everything shifts into a different focus.

Your keyword choice should be based on drawing those potential conversions in.

Your site should include “calls to action” that drive visitors towards that conversion

Your success rate should be based on how many conversions have been achieved.

The importance of links for proving and improving your website popularity.

admin — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 10:27:57 +0000

Why are links important for search engine optimization?

Links are very hard for webmasters to manufacture artificially and so search engines, and particularly Google, rank them very highly as evidence of your websites’s popularity.

Links are essentially the highway around the world wide web. Google and other search engines send their spiders along this highway indexing sites and assessing their popularity.

Links and Page Rank

Page Rank is a score awarded by Google to a site based on the sites popularity. If websites linking to yours are quality, relevant sites they will add greatly to your Page Rank. Page Rank is one of the measurements Google count as they assess the relevance and value of your site. Page Rank is only one of many factors in determining where you list in Google results but it is an important one.

There are many free tools on the internet that you can use to check your page rank. Here is a link to one of them.

Page Rank Tool

You are scored out of 10, the higher the number the better your ranking

Which websites should I link to?

The answer to this question is very simple.

Relevant ones. Quality ones.

When choosing sites to link to you need to seek out sites that are relevant to your business and your customers and sites that would add value to what you are offering your clients.

Using those criteria it very easy to weed out spam sites and it makes sense to avoid link farms where reams of irrelevant and spammy links are sold. Avoid these like the plague!

Tips to make the most of your links.

Make sure links to your site include searchable keywords. For example, instead “click here” being the link, your company name or a pertinent keyword the link. The clickable words are given weight by search engines.

Direct your links to different pages on your site, not just the homepage. Make sure that your link text is relevant to the page it is pointing to

Google your keywords and see what other sites pop up. Either write to their webmasters and request a link and/or see who they are linking to.
Submit articles about topics of interest in your industry to relevant sites. Always include a link back to your site.
Create articles that people will want to link to – this is referred to as link bait or link magnets. Use social networking sites to promote your article
Paid links will not help your link rating

Using Content for Search Engine Optimization

Linda — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:37:36 +0000

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a hot topic. You have spent the time and money on getting a good website, now you want it to be found.

The first thing to understand about SEO is in order to get a good search ranking you need to give Google, and the other search engines, what they want. So what is Google looking for? Well it’s very simple, really, what they want is good, relevant sites, sites that provide their customers – your customers! – what they want.

So at the end of the day it all comes down to something you, as a small business owner, are very familiar with – providing your customers what they are looking for. When potential customers are searching online they are looking for information. The type of information they want, is something you should be very aware of.

Studies show that the majority of web surfers are doing research and that is why the search engines tend to favor sites that look informative and trustworthy.

Informative content is fairly simple to achieve. To be considered an informative site, you need content. Lots of good, solid, relevant content.

When planning content you need to keep relevancy and quality in the forefront of your mind. Relevancy because you want it to be very clear to search engines what your site is about, and what your area of expertise is. Quality because you want to keep customers coming back and, of course, when they are there, you want to impress them. That, after all, is the point of driving them to your site – to convert them into your customers.

The second thing to think about when planning content is keywords. The right keywords are absolutely vital to a good search engine optimization campaign. You want the keywords customers are using to searching for your type of services. These keywords need to be sprinkled throughout your content.

SEO experts all agree that keywords contained in the content of your site are the most enticing way to capture a search engine’s attention.

That said, do not be tempted to stuff your content with keywords.

You need to remember Google wants what the customer wants, and the customer does not want to land on a page that is essentially a list of keywords. So Google has taught their little spiders that crawl the web in search of good sites to disregard sites trying to trick them. Search engines have a very low tolerance for trickery and they have become more and more refined at spotting it.

So write content that is logical, and interesting and you will be rewarded with a better ranking. Of course, you want your subject matter to be very clear to spiders, so make sure to include keywords and use headings, lists and links to emphasize your point. By doing this, your website is given greater weight by search engines. So take time to plan carefully.

To write good SEO content follow these steps:

Plan a topic that is relevant.
Write a first draft without thinking about search engine optimization.
Read through your work and decide which keywords describe well what it is about – these keywords should also be relevant to your site as a whole.
Plan your headings and sub headings to include them.
Insert the keywords in logical places.

Once your site has a good quantity of quality, optimized content you are well on your way to being found.

Improve your search rankings and drive customers to your site

admin — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 19:37:03 +0000

Here at Yellow Jersey we believe your website is never “done”. It is an organic thing that should grow and develop. This means a constant process of refreshing and adding content. This requires an investment of time, something small business owners are notoriously short of, but it is well worth it if done correctly.

Keeping your site current is important for a number of reasons:

Your website is often the first impression a customer will get of your business and we all know how important first impressions are! You want to create energy and vitality. A fresh, current site portrays a vibrant, thriving business.
Most businesses start off with 3-10 pages on their site. This is a good start but should definitely not be the end. The more relevant pages you have the better your chances of a good search ranking.
Keep people coming back for more. If your site is interesting enough and updated frequently you will get repeat visitors to your site or even subscribers to your rss feed or your newsletter

A newsletter is a great way of combining your marketing efforts. The content you create for your newsletter becomes the content for your site. And if you host the content on your site, readers of your newsletter will click through and so be driven onto your site.

If you have a content managed site or a knowledge of html this is easy to do. Write the text, put it on your site and create the links in your newsletter. (If you have an email marketing service like Constant Contact this is a simple process). And voila you have a double edged marketing tool.

If you don’t have either we can help. We can either create you a content managed site or we can upload your newsletter content to your site for a very affordable monthly charge.

Either way we can empower you to cost effectively grow your business.

Email Marketing Tips

admin — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 18:46:43 +0000

Know Your Target Audience
Tailor your message according to your audience and your objective. Know what motivates your recipients and use it to determine how, and in what order, to describe the benefits of your offer.

Be Clear and Concise
Stick to simple words, short phrases and paragraphs consisting of 1-3 short sentences. Your recipients should not have to think too much, parse long sentences or read big sections of text. Check for words that can be eliminated. You will be surprised at how many you find and how much cleaner your writing is when you are finished.

Get to the Point
The first two sentences of your email should answer important questions for the recipient like, “Who are you? What do you want me to do? And what’s in it for me?” So state your offer up front, include benefits and make it easy for your audience to take the next step.

Include “Call to Action” Links
Know what action you want your recipients to take. Do you want them to read an article? Learn more about a product or service? Buy something? Then, place a link in the beginning, middle and end of the email, making it easy for the recipient to click whenever they are ready. People read, react, make decisions and take action differently. By sprinkling links throughout your email, you can be ready whenever they are.

Create a Sense of Urgency
Limit the offer to a specific time period or, for example, the first 50 customers. People don’t like to be at a disadvantage or left out. Try throwing in a bonus, for example, “Act now and also receive?” to sweeten the deal.

Proofread
Read your email copy aloud. If you stumble over words or phrases, rewriting is a very good idea. Check your spelling and grammar thoroughly. Errors not only make your email harder to read, they can make your company look unprofessional. Ask others who are not involved with your business to read your email. They will be able to tell you if it makes sense.

Punctuate Judiciously
Save exclamation points for when you really need them, use ALL CAPS carefully for emphasis and steer clear of emoticons . The benefits of the offer itself will motivate the recipient more effectively without reasonless clutter.

Improve your subject lines.
To put it most simply, a good subject line will get an email opened. Lead with a benefit that lets the receiver know what’s in it for him or her. Make it interesting, and try to pique the reader’s curiosity. You want the reader to feel compelled to find out more.

Check your “from” name.
Most emails that are quickly ignored or deleted are those with an unrecognizable “from” name or address. Is your “from” name easily recognizable? Do your list members know who they are receiving an email from? Put a name that your receivers are most familiar with in your “from” line.

Evaluate how often (and what) you send.
Sometimes the reason why people don’t open emails is because they simply get too many of them. Or, on the flip side, maybe you’re not sending often enough and recipients are losing interest in between the times when they do hear from you.

Beyond these general guidelines, it is experience that will help you improve your response. Define your objective, your audience and your offer, and then be creative!

These tips brought to you by our partners at Constant Contact

Should you use an email marketing service?

admin — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:16:33 +0000

Email marketing is an affordable and effective marketing technique that can help you grow your business while keeping costs low. (The value of Email Marketing)
But do you really need to pay for an email marketing service when you can just as easily send emails from your own email account? You might be surprised to see how many reasons there are to answer yes to this question.

The short answer is that regular email accounts are just not set up for mass email marketing.

We have compiled a simple list of reasons why this is the case, and why an email marketing service might be just what you need to jumpstart your online marketing efforts.

Reason 1:
There are serious potential restrictions from both the sending and receiving end when you use a regular email account.

Sending – Mass emails can be blocked by ISPs (internet service providers). Most ISPs have a limit to how many emails you can send in one day.
Receiving -Your emails can be blocked on the receiving end too if they are perceived as spam. With an email marketing service, while your customer sees your address as the “from” address, it is actually sent by the email marketing service. The email marketing service has relationships with the ISPs and therefore they recognize your email is not spam.

Reason 2:
Another potential issue you may run into, sending mass emails from your regular email account, is that there is no system set up to receive notification if your email generates spam complaints.

If your emails are perceived as spam you run the risk of having your entire corporate email server blocked

Reason 3:
There are strict rules for email marketing that you need to follow such as

A physical address on each email
An unsubscribe option that must be honored within 10 days
Email marketing services are required to be aware of all regulations regarding email marketing and are responsible for ensuring your email campaign meets these criteria.

Reason 4:
With an email marketing service you can get detailed, measurable results. This is one my favorite benefits of an email marketing service. If you are spending time and money on marketing it is important to get as detailed a measurement of your response as you possibly can. When you send out marketing, whether it be print or email, you will measure the number of responses to your marketing piece and if you have analytics on your website you can measure whether the hits on your site rose around the time of your marketing efforts. But there are a number of details that you cannot measure, and this can be incredibly frustrating. How many people did it actually reach? How many read it, how many discarded it without giving it much attention. What piqued their interest, where did you lose them?

Many email marketing services will answer all these questions for you by providing you with detailed reports regarding the effectiveness of your email campaign. Many services report the number of emails sent, opened, who opened, who clicked through and which links they clicked on. This enables you to get a much better feel for what appeals to your customer, allowing you to really fine tune your marketing efforts, and giving you a powerful competitive edge.
Reports also show new subscribes, unsubscribes, bounces and formal spam complaints.

Yellow Jersey Design partners with Constant Contact, a provider of an excellent email marketing service. They are affordable and provide a great package for small to medium size businesses. Jersey Design can create a branded template that ties into your website and gives your email campaign a professional polish that will greatly increase its effectiveness and reflect well on your company.

Click here to find out more about Constant Contact or contact us at Yellow Jersey Design

The value of email marketing

admin — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:03:25 +0000

“The cost of acquiring a new customer can be as much as 5 times
the cost of keeping an old one.” (source: Peppers and Rogers)

“Permission e-mail campaigns are ten times more effective
than direct mail campaigns.”(source: IMT Strategies)

Email marketing can be a very cost effective and powerful tool in your marketing efforts. Companies are increasingly turning to online forms of marketing such as search engine optimization, banner ads, google ads and email marketing. Email marketing is the simplest, and most targeted of these options.

Email Marketing is:

Effective:
Sending out regular newsletter with information that is relevant and interesting to your client base is an excellent way to keep in communication with them, thereby increasing your chances of referrals and repeat business. If you can make your newsletter content valuable enough your newsletter may even become a value add that you provide for your customer, increasing your value from their perspective.

Targeted:
With permission based email marketing your message is going directly to people who are interested in your product. Whether they be existing or past clients, or potential clients who have signed up for your newsletter on your website, your audience is targeted and open to listening to your message.

Affordable:
Email marketing is incredibly cost effective. If you use an email marketing service (Should you use an email marketing service?) you can find packages for as low as $15 a month. For small businesses email marketing is a powerful tool and in this arena the playing field can be completely leveled. With a professional, branded and interesting email newsletter a small business can compete equally with a much larger business with a far greater marketing budget.

Green:
It’s great for the planet and this can also be an effective selling point to get email addresses from your clients and potential clients.

Writing good website copy

admin — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 19:27:59 +0000

Writing web copy can be tricky. It is very different than any other form of business writing or marketing. On the web people have less tolerance for a lot of text, they generally skim through it. Yet, at the same time studies show the majority of people online are researching and looking for information, so your web copy needs to have some substance to it- to meet this need.

Then there is the added complication of search engine optimization. Your text is one of your primary tools to improve your search engine rankings, but how do you write text that’s full of searchable keywords but still interesting and enticing to your web visitors? After all why drive people to your website if you cannot impress them once they get there?

Its all about balance.

Below are a few basic tips to guide you in your quest for excellent web copy. Watch this space for more tips in the coming months.

Watch your length,

The trick with website content is to create enough content to make your site look full, provide information your web visitors will be looking for and create enough relevant content to be searchable. At the same time you must not create reams of text. A long page full of text is very off-putting, so be careful not to waffle and try to strike a balance between meaty and punchy.
Keep it clear

Readers don’t read online material in the same way they do printed material. They scan. Studies show that online readers read about 20- 28% of text on a webpage. One idea per paragraph works well. Bullet points and short paragraphs are also effective.
Treat every page as a landing page

People can arrive at your website on any page, not just the home page, so every page needs to have engaging content.
Keep your tone light and vivid

Droning, boring text will drive people away from your website very quickly.
Keep everything customer-centric.

Continually ask yourself: would visitors to my site be interested in this?
Don’t exaggerate

It’s is very important to come across as a trustworthy site/business.
Use your copy as a marketing tool

Keep in mind that your website copy is one of the key elements for search engines to find your site. So the more relevant copy the better, and make sure you are using keywords that are optimized for search engines to find you. A word of caution – never keyword stuff your text. You will drive away human visitors, but you will also drive away the search engines. Search engines have sophisticated tools that spot this sort of thing. Your site can be banned if you try any underhanded methods to improve your rankings.

So start with a plan, lay it all out and then have fun with it. Keep in mind that a website is never “done”. You should always be tweaking, updating and testing what works and what doesn’t.

Happy writing!

Yellow Jersey Web Design

Why we love WordPress

SEO Tip

Conversions are key in website optimisation

The importance of links for proving and improving your website popularity.

Why are links important for search engine optimization?

Links and Page Rank

Which websites should I link to?

Tips to make the most of your links.

Using Content for Search Engine Optimization

Improve your search rankings and drive customers to your site

Email Marketing Tips

Should you use an email marketing service?

The value of email marketing

Writing good website copy

Watch your length,

Keep it clear

Treat every page as a landing page

Keep your tone light and vivid

Keep everything customer-centric.

Don’t exaggerate

Use your copy as a marketing tool