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 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 [...]

Forget your blog, forget your readers, forget SEO

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

There is nothing worse than setting up a blog and then forgetting about it – like someone said in a Twitter post, “a blog with no new content is like a cheese sandwich”. Although this made me smile, he is right. An inactive blog is the same as a brochure website, looking pretty but with [...]

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 [...]

Websites and blogs: how are they different?

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Actually a blog is a kind of website, as they have many similar attributes.
They both occupy a presence on the internet, use an URL or web address, need a host server to keep them online, contain information such as text content, pictures, links and keywords, both benefit from search engine optimisation and can be tracked [...]

'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 [...]

Have you considered a blogsite?

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a website that achieves almost immediate recognition from search engines and benefits from frequent updates that are achievable by you and not a web-designer?
This is all possible from a ‘blogsite’, a combination of a website and a blog from Wordpress, the blog provider I use for my own blog [...]