Posted by: Graham Ward October 23rd, 2008 — Search Engine Marketing
With large PPC customers comes large problems! Manipulating keywords and producing new combinations is great when you have 50 keywords, when working with 50,000 keywords the PPC professional needs to make a choice between getting RSI and getting their macro on!
With very little knowledge you can brute force a lot of simple problems using macros, here is a quick introduction to macro semantics and some functions that PPC has called for!
Posted by: David Lindop October 23rd, 2008 — Setfire Media
Those of you who use Wordpress on your own websites will likely encounter this problem pretty soon.
Installing the latest Flash version 10 will disable the ability of any web platform that uses the SWFUpload library due to security reasons. To put this into context it will cripple the upload ability of Wordpress, Flickr, Yahoo, zooomr - along with many more services I’m not aware of.
In Wordpress you click you Add media > Add an Image, and from there click on Choose Files to Upload, only for nothing to happen.
Posted by: Andy Boyd October 20th, 2008 — Email Marketing, Setfire Media
If you’ve been working in search optimisation for any length of time you’ll have heard how important it is to properly optimise your page title tag. Chances are you’ll also have heard that the meta description is also important, but on a lesser scale.
I agree wholeheartedly: getting your onpage SEO dialed in is critical. It’s much easier to rank a site that ticks all the onpage boxes, but that’s not to say it is impossible to rank a poorly optimised site through sheer brute force. However, I would rather make a job easier in the long run and so before I start trying to build links into a site I like to get the basics sorted.
Getting your titles and meta descriptions done properly is a painstaking and at times arduous task, which is something I can attest to. However, when you see the fruits of your labour, ie. ranking higher, then it can actually be a rewarding endeavour. So here we are: 18 tips to help you optimise your page title and meta description.
Posted by: John Main October 14th, 2008 — Development, Email Marketing, Setfire Media
So recently I had the challenge of creating a ‘has_many through’ relationship across two databases.
“Why would you do this?” you may ask. Well quite simply I am in a team building a new data management system to sit on top of a legacy system with its legacy database. All the new code is new, shiny and streamlined and the old code is… well… crap but we have to keep both systems running concurrently so we have various tables in the legacy database we need to access from the new system. As it happens we need to access the legacy users table in a ‘has_many through’ from the new ‘orders’ table.
Continue reading →
As anyone who’s ever made an e-commerce system knows, money is everything. No, really if you don’t get your financial sums right then you can’t hope to build a successful online business (and may find yourself creating potential legal issues with the tax man).
So here’s a rundown of the top tips I can give for making your financial calculations that bit easier.
I can’t stress enough how much this helps in terms of accuracy, rounding and speed. Working in major units may look better to you as you don’t have to reformat the numbers to display them but I hope I can make the case here for minor units.
Remember that even a single decimal place makes a number a float as far as your computer is concerned and all the processor overheads that go along with them suddenly arrive. I know it’s not a lot slower but in a complex financial system it all adds up believe me.
Friday 31st October… mark that date in your diary, preferably with pink high-lighter, because it’s the 2008 Wear it Pink day organised by Breast Cancer Campaign, the funding body that supports national research into breast cancer.
We’ll be doing our bit here at Setfire to raise a few quid, although some of us may need to search hard for something pink to wear. Hopefully we can get some photos posted!
Posted by: Jonathan Clark September 29th, 2008 — Development
When you get successful, you may find that you move from someone else looking after your hosting, to running a complete rack (or racks) yourself. Standing with that shiny new rack towering over you, there seems so much space and flexibility, and anything not quite right now can be fixed later, right?
Correcting a bad installation will be extremely difficult, disruptive, or just impossible to do once you are up and running. Follow these tips in planning your rack before the first piece of equipment goes in and you will save not only time later, but you will be thanking me when the sh*t hits the fan.
I’m an address bar guy; I don’t use bookmarks and barely use a link toolbar. And somedays, my typing could be better - if/when the new gTLDs come in, the owners of ‘facebook.comk’ and ‘google.comk’ will get a good 50% of my surfing time and a catch-all on ’setfiremedia.comk’ would receive all of my internal emails. I’m just as bad with .co.uk - the amount of traffic I send to ‘news.bbc.co.il’ and ‘news.bbc.co.yj’ is shocking.
Posted by: Andy Boyd September 22nd, 2008 — Search Engine Optimisation
There are many ways to build backlinks. There are many ways to waste your time building backlinks too. Anyone who has ever been involved with a prolonged linkbuilding campaign will tell you that it’s hardly the most glamorous of jobs, nor is it particularly inspirational. Days go by in a blur of emails and weeks tend to endlessly slide by in a blaze of IM chats, forum PMs and phone calls. All this and it can still take months before the fruits of your labour are manifested in better organic rankings.
Let it be known: building links is not easy. Therefore, it makes sense to invest your time and effort in something that just works. And for me, that means guest posting.
Posted by: Ian Cowley September 16th, 2008 — Search Engine Marketing
How do you measure the true return on PPC ad spend when phone leads or phone sales are not being taken into account?
If we take a typical e-commerce store as an example, up to 35% of sales can be taken over the telephone. Accurately attributing these sales can make a big difference to how you optimise your PPC campaigns, and have an effect on the overall ROI from paid search marketing.
Most web analytics solutions do a great job of tracking where sales come from, be it from organic search traffic, direct type-in traffic or PPC traffic. However, the source of telephone orders is one area that site owners often choose to ignore because it’s difficult to track.
Here’s a few ways to track PPC traffic that generates orders over the phone.
