Alice Elliott's blog

Writing for the web is not just words

Tuesday, May 4th, 2010

I had a bit of a rude awakening the other day when an expert told me off about my webcopy.

My trouble is I think visually, which sometimes I concentrate too much on how a website should look. This isn’t necessarily how pretty it is, but how the visitor views the page when they enter the site – [...]

Keyphrases: how to use them

Thursday, April 8th, 2010

Keywords and phrases are words which trigger a response from the search engine spiders (mathematical robots that crawl the web looking for new content to index). They are effective if they are tuned into what people type into the search engines at this moment in time, and you can find this out through the Google [...]

Analyse how your website performs

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

One of the areas of my new job is to analyse websites for improvement. This involves looking at Google Analytics to view its performance, assessing what the visitor sees when they visit the site, and whether the design and copy works or not.
Assessing Analytics
Going into the Analytics of a website is a fascinating experience. There [...]

What 3 elements make up SEO?

Monday, November 9th, 2009

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the natural or organic method of getting your website placed higher in the search engines, as opposed to paying for online advertising.
As a result it is a task that is never ending, always requiring you to be one step ahead of your competitors, and any successes tend to be short [...]

Internet spiders and how they help websites

Friday, October 9th, 2009

An internet spider is a robot that crawls around the world wide web. They are also sometimes called crawlers. They use an algorithmic programme that follows links throughout the net searching for new content. This then fetches the new webpages and adds them to the search engine indexes. Google is a crawler-based search engine, as [...]

What is Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising?

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

Pay per click is a form of paid for online advertising by Google. These adverts are found in the shaded area of a search engine page above the ‘organic’ or natural links (usually the first three links), and the remainder are placed in the area reserved for Sponsored Links in the right sidebar.
PPC, also [...]

Saying exactly what in the tin

Friday, July 10th, 2009

Following on from my visible networking material idea I came across this business card from Jill Wigmore-Welsh. I wanted to share it with you because it stood out from all the other business cards at this networking meeting I went to.
Why? Because the first thing it said is what she does, but in a way [...]

Keywords should entertain blog readers as well as search engine spiders

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

Keywords or key-phrases are particular words that are the most searched for in search engines. Found through websites such as Wordtracker, they are, in fact, search engine spider food, and including them in your blog posts will help raise your status in search engine optimisation (SEO).
Keywords or key-phrases should be inserted into four places in [...]

'Blackberry' doesn't say 'babies clothes' to me

Monday, June 29th, 2009

One young entrepreneur was asking for advice on her babies’ clothes business on a women’s business forum. She had decided to call it ‘Blackberry Babes’ and wondered if it was a good name or not. This is my response:
I’m still a little confused why you need to use ‘blackberry’ – is there some underlying [...]

New business? Want a website? My advice is: don’t!

Friday, June 26th, 2009

You’re an entrepreneur and you want to start up a business. Great.
The first reaction to getting a slot on the internet is to get a website. Wrong!
Why wrong? This is because websites are notoriously expensive things! How much cash do you have? I suggest you should have a good think before you go throwing it [...]