• Firstly, are you getting enough traffic? Many online retailers ask, why only 1/50 people might buy when they get visitors to their website. If 1 in 50 bought, you would have good conversion rate of 2%.  This is nothing to worry about, don’t expect every single visitor to your website to buy. Their are hundreds of factors which you cannot control. Have they been paid? Are they simply browsing? Do they have a need and want and the ability to buy your product? Are they shopping for themselves or someone else? However, if you only get 100 hits  month, then your first call should be running an effective Search Engine Optimisation campaign along PPC for instant traffic.
• Stock, price and availability are the next importantly aspect. Once someone is on your website, and you sell what they want to buy. Do you have their product in stock and if so are you at the same price as your competitors. Many online retailers come to us and ask why their products don’t sell, commonly all their competitors have special offers running or are simply selling the product cheaper. It is important to try and stay in line with you competitors. We appreciate it is sometimes hard to cut margins, but volume with a smaller margin, is better than very few sales at all. Furthermore, it will also help you compete more due to better online cash flow.
• Another key point is delivery times and charges, if a customer is buying a small value product, but paying over the odds in postage, they may not buy. Equally, some online retailers claim back lost points on price promotions through making a profit on postage. We believe in a good fair postage model, the customer will see you are being transparent and feel more comfortable in shopping with you.

“Why am i not getting online sales?

Their are obviously many reasons why your online shop might not perform as expected. So for a custom, unique analysis please contact the experts at High Tide Marketing. Please click here or call 01429 818 332

The post Why Am I Not Getting Online Sales? appeared first on High Tide Marketing.

1) Google and the other search engines love unique content

2) Real people like reading informative, unique content to learn something new or read about a topic of interest.

Thus, good, regular and most importantly, unique content, is essential for both SEO success and also web traffic. But how can you increase your traffic and keep the search engines happy? Well, our top tip on how to achieve this is through a regular SEO blog writing.

Having a website blog, and performing SEO Blog Writing, tells Google that you intent to update regularly, meaning the search engine crawlers will visit your website more and more often to find out whats changed. This is especially important if you are a online business, as when you add a new product, you want the search engines to rank you for it quickly, and ideally, higher/before your competitors.

Through the nature of having a website blog, you can easily and regularly post informative article or ‘blogs’ around a given topic. The best way to do this is to choose a given topic area then choose a specific key phrase to target. For example, if you are a shop selling computers, you could write a review of the new laptop being released. If you perform your SEO blog writing correctly, your new post should be keyword rich and dense, unique and SEO friendly towards your target key phrase.

Once your have written your article, as it should already be set to benefit your for SEO rankings, you now can help your website receive more credit-ability and web traffic with it through posting links to it on Facebook, Twitter and article submission websites (Digg etc..)

Why not have a look at one of our blogs we’ve written for our client Hartlepool Watersports about the keyword ‘North East Watersports‘ and get in touch with us today, to learn more about how we can help you grow your natural SEO.

The post SEO Blog Writing appeared first on High Tide Marketing.

Introducing an opportunity to grow your Magento Store through their new initiative, MagentoLive.

MagentoLive aims to deliver valuable knowledge and personal support from the Magento team and the talented developers behind it. Furthermore, they are also going to be bringing along several people, who are experts in the ecommerce ecosystem to offer advice.

But when, where and how is it? MagentoLive UK starts on the 13th November 2012 in London with the main event running 8am – 6pm.

However, their are things you can be doing now to help your Magento Store grow in sales, traffic and revenue. Below, we have put a few of our top tips to getting the most out of your Magento Store.

Magento Store top tips

1. Always be original – never copy and paste content from another website or online shop. This is seen a duplicate content, and you will be punished in the search engines for this. Equally, try not to simply find and replace product names and colour variants, try to write each product description unique and keyword rich. Remember, how does the search engine know what to rank your page for if you do not make it clear to it. Be careful however, as keyword spamming is bad!
2. Try to manually suggest related products that you want to cross and up sell on product pages. For example, if you are selling mens and womens clothing, only suggest men’s clothing to men.
3. Remember to complete SEO meta data at both, category, brand and product level. Google and the other search engines don’t just look at  on site content. Our tip for completing this is using the Google Keyword Tool and to decide on one key focus for each page. The same analogy applies, make sure you repeat what keyword you are optimising each page for.

However, if you are looking at getting a new Magento Store or possibly looking at improving your existing online store, have a look at our eCommerce Web Design Packages

The post Magento Store – A New Side in the UK appeared first on High Tide Marketing.

Firstly, you need to find out exactly when your last delivery day will be! You can then plan emails, social media and a big push the day before as the ‘Last Chance to get it in time for Christmas’.

Secondly, you need to decide if you are going to run a sale after Christmas, if you are, for how long and what sale promotion – this is an integral part of your Christmas Online Marketing Plan. This can be advertised as the boxing day sale and could be automated to run from midnight on Christmas day. This can be used to clear our surplus stock, and the % discount could vary year on year, shop on shop depending on how the pre-Christmas sales have been. Ie if sales have been slow, you could had an aggressive approach of a big discount to increase cash flow whereas if sales have been good, you can preserve your margins with a small discount then grow on it.

Thirdly, on the final few days countdown to Christmas, why not operate a ’12 days of Christmas’ promotion, each day could be a different price promotion, free gift or other added incentive to buy. This is great, as something which might appeal to one, doesn’t nessessarily appeal to all. Apple’s iTunes last year ran a similar promotion which offered 1 free download each day as part of their own Christmas Online Marketing Plan

Other ideas for your Christmas Online Marketing Plan include:

• In September/October why not create some tags or new categories on your website entitled ‘gifts for men’ gifts for women’ etc, here you could place products which you believe would suit different sexes and also make great Christmas Presents. Get this in your Christmas Online Marketing Plan nice and early to ensure the categories are indexed by Google and seen by customers.
• You could send a eNewsletter to all of your subsribers giving them a voucher code for a specific amount off or a gift voucher to spend.
• Within your delivery options, you could develop a function which allows gift wrapping at an added cost, and also highlight a different delivery address to billing address. This would be advertised as offering ‘Christmas’ delivery.

The post Christmas Is Coming – 89 Days to Go – Christmas Online Marketing Plan appeared first on High Tide Marketing.

Hartlepool Web Design – www.Hartlepool-Watersports.com

Our Hartlepool web design team have recently launched another Hartlepool businesses’ new website Get Wet Hartlepool, which is part of the Hartlepool Marina group. Here, our Hartlepool web design client wanted a fun looking website with a ‘get wet’ style to advertise their range of water activities. This website we have made easy to use, simple to update through the WordPress content management system and importantly SEO friendly. Furthermore, we also highly recommend having a go of the Thundercat Racing experience, it is truly mind blowing.

Hartlepool Web Design – www.Riversea-Band.com

Another Hartlepool Web Design client includes Riversea, a local Progressive Rock band. Here, the lads wanted a powerful looking website, with deep feelings and emotion in order to sell their new album online through. Their website has since sold 100′s of copies of the album “Out of an ancient world”, proving the website is easy to use, and is a great platform for sales. A big factor for this website was an active social media integration including Twitter Feeds, Facebook like & share buttons and ensuring the lads were effectively using these social media platforms.

Please browse around the rest of our website, and at our latest web design packages. Whether you are in Hartlepool or not, we specialise is a unique, personal customer service, at a fantastic price and value. We are currently offering WordPress Websites starting at £250, with a free domain name, 3 months free hosting, £50 AdWords voucher and much more! Please click here to view our web design packages.

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The attack appeared to take down websites that use GoDaddy servers to host their information, as well as those that have registered their domain names with the company.

By Monday night, GoDaddy, which claims to be the “largest hosting provider of secure websites in the world,” said most of its sites were online again:

“Most customer hosted sites back online,” GoDaddy said on Twitter. “We’re working out the last few kinks for our site & control centers. No customer data compromised.”

The more problematic, and important factor of GoDaddy Down time was that any domain registered with GoDaddy that uses its nameservers and DNS records were down. In basic terms, even if you host your site elsewhere, using GoDaddy (Premium DNS Hosting) for DNS means it was inaccessible in the GoDaddy Down time. This is particularly important factor, as their is a large proportion of customers who just use GoDaddy for their DNS & domain name tools – yet host elsewhere. An example of this is ‘BudgetSimple who don’t use GoDaddy as a web host, but is currently using it as its registrar and as its DNS provider.’

Why was GoDaddy Down?

The company, which says it hosts 53 million domain names, on Tuesday 11th September commented on the GoDaddy Down problem:

“It was not a ‘hack’ and it was not a denial of service attack (DDoS), we have determined the service outage was due to a series of internal network events that corrupted router data tables. Throughout our history, we have provided 99.999 percent uptime in our DNS infrastructure. This is the level our customers expect from us and the level we expect of ourselves,” GoDaddy Interim CEO Scott Wagner wrote in an e-mail.

The post GoDaddy Down caused by router snafu, not DDoS attack appeared first on High Tide Marketing.

GoDaddy host over 55 Million websites and is one of the largest domain providers on the planet.

At the moment GoDaddy has no Eta on resolving the issue.

The post GoDaddy Down appeared first on High Tide Marketing.

Leading search engine giant Google, is changing their search algorithium to ensure legal download website’s recieve a higher ranking position than pirate sites.

Already thanked and welcomed by many record companies and film studios, this change should see websites such as pirate bay not appear in Google as much, and as higher. This has come after many years of companies, artists and more, complainging that Google should be doing more to fight piracy. Their argument was based on search results for performers returning pages upon pages of illegal download torrents and piracy sites before official legal download websites. From next week, the Google search results will take into consideration the number of “valid copyright removal notices” each site has, which means sites with more notices will rank lower, however Google has not specified what it considers as a valid notice.

The BPI which represent record labels in the UK has welcomed the news, stating that users expect and want to see official and legal download websites above pirate sites. However many people are sceptical of this change, saying that people already know what the pirate sites are, they will simply use the on site search to download illegal content.

The post Google Devalues Pirate Websites appeared first on High Tide Marketing.

Here at High Tide Marketing we are WordPress specialists, from design, integration, support and training we can help with WordPress.

Common problems people need help with WordPress for

Their are obviously, several common problems people need help with WordPress for. Firstly, our most common questions surround SEO, WordPress SEO plug ins and how is best to configure them. We recommend a WordPress SEO plug in that allows the addition of SEO meta titles, descriptions and keywords, along with ensuring all URLs are SEO friendly. We also off SEO help with WordPress as a professional service, where we will make sure your new or existing WordPress website is SEO friendly and complies with all the latest SEO best practices.

Secondly, we are asked about how to add Facebook and other social media links and buttons to blogs, pages and more. Again, this is a vital necessity in this day and age of social media interaction. We can offer help with WordPress to configure plug ins or write custom pieces of code in order to help your website interact socially.

Thirdly, and most importantly, we receive lots of questions about how to add a contact form to your website. This is a very important tool to ensure you receive more contact and business from your website’s customers and browsers. Again, we can offer help with WordPress to set up a professional, but effective contact form.

Help with WordPress

We are sure to be able to help and resolve your WordPress issues and can offer a training – in person or over the phone/email, if simply fix your problem there and then. So if you require a little extra help with WordPress, we have a few ways in which you can get in touch;

• Why not give our great team of WordPress experts a ring on 01429 818 332
• Enquire through our website and a member of our team will be in touch, please click here
• Message us on Facebook & Twitter

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Mark Bowness came to High Tide Marketing looking for a professional CMS website to showcase his talents as a “life change instigator”. Having already had success with BBC2 program “Tribewanted” Mark needed a website to provide information on his services and projects.

The team at High Tide set to work creating a CMS based site which allows Mark to update his blogs and articles with ease. The most important element of the site is providing information on Mark’s current projects and his consultancy services.

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