http://www.puresilva.com The turnaround week for precious metal asset prices may have come when gold touched $2,075 before the Bank of Russia abolished the ruble-gold link and sent gold prices plunging. Unsurprisingly, with US gold/silver futures markets closed in NY today, gold is up at $1,713 after sliding to $1,689 l... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=06/09/2022&EventID=238 The turnaround week for precious metal asset prices may have come when gold touched $2,075 before the Bank of Russia abolished the ruble-gold link and sent gold prices plunging. Unsurprisingly, with US gold/silver futures markets closed in NY today, gold is up at $1,713 after sliding to $1,689 l... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=06/09/2000&EventID=237 All the facts and figures regarding Twitter in 2014 can be found below (via mediabistro.com) ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=25/09/2014&EventID=236 You only get 140 characters when composing a "tweet" on Twitter, so you need to make the most of each and every character. Your message does in theory go further than your followers - people can use the search tool, and your message may well match their search criteria - so always bear that in mind... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=24/09/2014&EventID=235 There's a myriad of free Twitter tools out there to help you find out more about the people who follow you - but given there's so many, it's hard to know which tools are the most appropriate for WHAT you want to find out. Luckily, <a href="http://marketingthink.com/10-key-questions-about-your-tweet... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=25/09/2014&EventID=234 Twitter - when used correctly - is a fantastic way to broadcast your messages. However, 99.9% of Twitter users aren't making the most of their account. There's no two ways about it - you need to offer people something interesting and informative to not only gain new followers, but keep them too. ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=23/09/2014&EventID=233 Via infographicscreator.com - an interesting statistic:- Twitter is grabbing MORE new customers. 53% of Twitter users have been a member for less than a year, compared to just 19% for Facebo... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=22/09/2014&EventID=232 Your Twitter stream can end up looking like a blur of words as you scroll down it - interrupted by the odd striking image. And its these striking images that win most of the retweets. Not all tweets have the image expanded automatically, but once they're retweeted, they are expanded - encouraging a... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=11/09/2014&EventID=231 A lot of companies have been clinging onto SEO as a method of marketing - mainly because if it works (if Google rewards you), it's a very passive form of marketing that gives you a lot of reward for (on-going) little effort. However, relying soley on search is taking destiny out of your hands. We ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=09/09/2014&EventID=230 Understandably, the phrase "social marketing" leaves a lot of small business owners cold. Your own personal experience of dabbling with Twitter or Facebook might leave you yawning and wondering what all the fuss is about. From a personal perspective, "meh" is a perfectly valid response to these pl... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=04/09/2014&EventID=229 Google have been acting as a de facto (and unelected) "government of webmasters" for a few years now, and their latest "law" shows just how much control they have over all webmasters who see Google as vital to their business (important point!). HTTPS is now a ranking signalGoogle have stat... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=07/08/2014&EventID=228 Twitter became famous for one single limit: no more than 140 characters per message. However, there other rather interesting limits that Twitter imposes on its users, highlighted by mediabistro.com's infographic below:- <img src="http://www.puresilva.com/... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=07/08/2014&EventID=227 I find any kind of internet meme/trend annoying, so when http://uk.marketo.com/ compiled a list of Twitter phrases, I was actually quite pleased that I'd not encountered most of them - it's a bit of a bonus when I inadvertently miss such annoyances - see if you m... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=06/08/2014&EventID=226 With Facebook being stingy on on just how many of your fans get to see your Facebook posts, and Google just being plain weird when it comes to their organic rankings, the typical small business can start to wonder if the internet really is a good place to be found. There's so much competition out t... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=05/08/2014&EventID=225 Twitter is all about getting the attention of your followers. Do that, and they'll retweet and favourite your messages, which in turn will help gain you new followers. So Twitter is NOT about merely spamming your followers with links to your business site - it's about giving them a mix of tweets t... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=02/08/2014&EventID=224 An interesting theory posited over at webmasterworld.com here - to quote:- Do you think google hasn't done an analysis of how much recovery there will be on the next penguin refre... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=30/07/2014&EventID=223 Twitter is all about ENGAGEMENT, not just number of followers. It's also true that some tweets are more engaging than others, and this post looks at the most popular types of message that will encourage the engagement you're after (via themediaoctopus.com) ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=29/07/2014&EventID=222 The big question that every e-commerce website owner wants to know the answer to is : why did somebody abandon their basket on my site? There are many reasons why that might be, and the infographic below (designed by https://cwcs.co.uk/ ) sheds some light onto the r... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=29/07/2014&EventID=221 Ten years ago today (27th July 2014), I launched the shoptemplate.co.uk demo shop. This has now evolved into puresilva.com. <a href="http://www.puresilva.co... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=27/07/2014&EventID=220 To maximise the amount of people that see your posts on social networks, you need to be careful as to WHEN you make your posts. Here's an interesting infographic from http://www.socialcaffeine.com/ that highlights when to post on each of the major socia... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=21/07/2014&EventID=219 With Google becoming a less and less reliable traffic source, there's been a strong shift towards social networking platforms. However, it's so easy to get frustrated by the likes of Facebook and Twitter when it comes to promoting your business. There are three simple rules to follow:-Cont... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=20/07/2014&EventID=218 There's an infographic below (via socialmarketingwriting.com) with some useful tips regarding Twitter - but before you see that - there's a couple of basic tips I'd like to offer:-give your followers genuinely useful and interesting content to... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=19/07/2014&EventID=217 The maxim that a picture is worth a thousand words holds true for website content too - depending that you use high quality images appropriately. An image can represent the type of products you sell, or service you provide. It's that visceral information "hit" the fickle visitor gets so they can a... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=19/07/2014&EventID=216 Music - I like it, so I built a page that has some music on it! A daily dose of music brings you 3 recommended tracks to listen to plus a random UK top 40 from anywhere between 1960 and last year. I hop... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=17/07/2014&EventID=215 Hope is carrying out a task, and believing that positive results could very well come from completing the task. Confidence is carrying out a task, and anticipating positive results from the task. So how are you feeling when you carry out a task that you've failed at many times before, a... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=08/07/2014&EventID=214 Shoppers want to buy from your site - they don't want to register to your site. They also want to know how they can pay for their items before the checkout process begins. This video looks at two big barriers that many e-commerce websites needlessly put up in front of shoppers. <iframe width="5... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=03/07/2014&EventID=213 ...if you don't check your advanced location settings on your Adwords campaigns, you're likely wasting a lot of clicks! Did you know that if you target the UK for example, people outside the UK may still see your ad? Furthermore, even if you selected for your campaign to NOT appear on the Display Ne... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=02/07/2014&EventID=212 Customer reviews are incredibly helpful for shoppers to help decide whether to go with your product / service or not - make sure your website has such a feature! <iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/KMSrVX6O0e8?list=UUxTceRYo9YDOSZ9_9tEuniw" frameborder="0" allowfullscree... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=01/07/2014&EventID=211 Here's a video on how to make the most of your website's banner:- ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=30/06/2014&EventID=210 This is one of my first video blogs, so I'm just going to bulletpoint what it's about below - more details in the video below! One of my clients, John Evans of Distinctive Handmade Boxes, received a notice that his Adwords Ads had been suspended, because his website violated "Site Policy"... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=29/06/2014&EventID=209 It's easy to take each day as it comes - to react to everything - incoming emails and phone calls, followed up with a vague idea of what you plan to do that day. Quite often though, the day runs away from you - and you feel like nothing's been done, or not as much as you'd like to have done. While... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=26/06/2014&EventID=208 This is a post that's in danger of slipping into the "self-help" category, but nonetheless, I am compelled to make it. First off, I think we all want to make the most of our time in some way. It's going to come down to your own personal goals as to what making the most of your time means to you. ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=24/06/2014&EventID=207 The title says it all really - if your business model requires a considerable amount of hard work, skill, research and perseverence to be a success, then you can be sure that a lot of your competition will "thin out" as you get closer and closer to your goals. Conversely, if something is easy to ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=20/06/2014&EventID=206 I took a call today from a guy called Peter Brown who runs a drainage company - he had a question about one of the directories I run as he wanted to add his website to it. He mentioned that he ran his own directory (drainagecontractors.org.uk) for... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=18/05/2014&EventID=205 The purpose of this article is to uncover Google Adwords settings you may not be aware of, as they're buried away in "Advanced" sections. These are default settings that MAY lead to a lot of irrelevant clicks if you're not careful. Your Target LocationWhen you setup an Adwords campaign,... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=12/05/2014&EventID=204 Here's a sneak preview >> The new feature will allow you to create category lists, dynamic category lists, blog lists, and custom submenu lists (basically anything you want) - you can imagery too.... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=18/04/2014&EventID=203 Aaron Wall's latest analysis on Google reads like a modern version of Catch-22 - which sums up a lot of the logical sinkholes you'll find yourself falling down when hit with any kind of Google penalty. Enjoy it - but you will need a good hour of your time >> <a href="http://www.seobook.com/divi... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=27/01/2014&EventID=202 That's the final score. The away team won, when the home team thought they had the advantage. What am I talking about? The "battle" between what developers want to develop, and how the users of their websites / software / apps actually use their creations. Developers want to ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=15/01/2014&EventID=201 Trust is a big factor to ensuring any business success. If your business is online, it leaves prospective customers with a problem - how can they trust you when everything seems so remote? Building a rapport is tougher using just text and images. Here are some ideas below to help build trust with... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=11/01/2014&EventID=200 puresilva.com has gone through its first major re-design since it launched in 2006 - that's 7 years! The site was becoming an anachronism - outdated and even rather disheveled - a real horror show of table layouts and inline CSS - while of course being utter... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=26/12/2013&EventID=199 Why do so many internet marketing companies - self-described experts no less - send unsolicited spam emails to market their own company? If they can't market their own company without resorting to this measure, I doubt they'll be able to market yours successfully. You should be able to easily find ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=20/12/2013&EventID=198 Here are some updates to Puresilva planned for release through December:-Click-tracking on mailshot campaigns - see how many people (and which recipient) clicked through to your website from your mailshot campaignDetailed stats on how many subscribers sign-up each day to your mailin... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=08/12/2013&EventID=197 We all get phishing emails - your NatWest account has been suspended, your eBay account has been compromised, etc. They are bogus emails trying to scare you into giving away your details. They will always contain some kind of link within the email that they want you to click on. This link takes y... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=03/12/2013&EventID=196 I've noticed when logged into Facebook, and visiting websites with Facebook Like buttons, there's a little square box with the word "Switch" in it - in place of the Facebook Like button. It looks like this :- However, it... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=10/11/2013&EventID=195 The anticipation of sales is palpable after launching a new site. There's so much to discover about how your target market responds to your offering. That first sale is a big relief, but how quickly can you start making sales on a brand new website? This will depend on a number of factors:-<li... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=10/11/2013&EventID=192 The puresilva website template has simplified its pricing. You can now try it out for FREE for 14 days, followed by monthly payments of £19.99 per month, with no minimum term contract. This is due to a big demand from enquiries to offer a lower commitment to purchasing the template. The ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=24/10/2013&EventID=191 Since giving up on SEO, I've freed up so much more time to work on other marketing strategies. Apparently there was a Penguin update earlier this month (some SEO news I simply can't escape the reporting of on Twitter and in my email inbox). Emails from (ever increasingly) desperate SEOs with their... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=22/10/2013&EventID=190 Search engines have encouraged us to be quite passive with our marketing. We tend to wait for people to find us, rather than go out and seek them. The former requires less effort than the latter, but the former is certainly not guaranteed! My core service is website development. Should I wait... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=05/08/2013&EventID=189 Listen to Matt Cutts (chief PR man of Google's spam team), and he'll tell you to write great content. He doesn't say you'll rank well if you do so, but he keeps telling us to write great content. It's good advice, after all. Great content leads to more sales and more recommendations. Great conte... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=16/05/2013&EventID=188 With the growth in mobile (specifically, small screen) website traffic, website developers are having their hand forced into ensuring their websites are friendly to such small-screen visitors. Mobile visitors have different needs to desktop users. You can indulge desktop visitors a lot more with a... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=05/05/2013&EventID=187 Essentially, you need to:- 1. Have a product or service that has a demand, and...2. the supply of your product or service must be easy enough to find for your target market, and... 3. the quality of your product or service must be of a standard that generates word of mouth... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=27/01/2013&EventID=186 In the years to come, your brand will be on a much stronger platform if you can control the platform it's on. There's nothing wrong with social media, but it should augment your marketing endeavours, not be the centre of it. To put it bluntly, your main focus should be on your company/business... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=26/07/2012&EventID=185 You can now buy our website template at just £25 per month over 10 months (interest free). This puts our template in line with the monthly cost of EKMPowershop (when including VAT), but with puresilva your payments would stop after 10 months (when you've paid off your website) - after that there ar... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=21/06/2012&EventID=184 There's been a lot of talk about Google favouring big brands in their SERPs (search engine result pages) - and with their recent announcement that <a href="http://searchengineland.com/google-product-search-to-become-google-shopping-use-pay-to-pla... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=10/06/2012&EventID=183 .....Northampton, Massachusetts, about 3000 miles from where I live - not very local! My Google+ profile tells me I live in Northampton, England, but when I go to my local results, I see Northampton, Massachusetts results. I suppose it's closer than Northampton, Western Australia....... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=31/05/2012&EventID=182 There's definitely a need for site owners to communicate with their visitors directly - often in a kind of present-tense style - to let them know about something that's happening now. Maybe it's :-new products that have just come into stocka new voucher code they want to let them k... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=26/05/2012&EventID=181 I'm not sure how well the updates to Google's privacy policy are helping deliver more relevant ads on their Adsense platform. Case in point: I visited a competitor's site the other day, and since then, many other sites I visit (that have Google Adsense) have this company's ad appearing. Even on to... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=10/04/2012&EventID=180 When it comes to selling items, a popular category amongst our clients is fashion. As the fashion market online is a very saturated one when it comes to competition, it's also a good insight into how to succeed online even if you're in a crowded market. Here's some things I've found, looking at wh... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=22/02/2012&EventID=179 If Google+ succeeds as a social network, it will mean small businesses will be hobbled with yet ANOTHER platform to setup an account with and market from. Bigger busineses can afford to throw more human resources at yet another marketing channel - smaller businesses will have to compromise their ow... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=07/02/2012&EventID=178 While Google have helped my business over the years (and continue to do so via bringing me traffic), and helped my clients too, there's now a number of looming problems with their services that deserve a mention, especially since we're all (like it or not) so reliant on Google. I think all of these... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=24/01/2012&EventID=177 Despite all the hype about Facebook and Twitter as platforms to promote a business, the search engines Google still provides the most targeted, intent-driven traffic to websites. The difference between someone clicking on a link in Facebook or Twitter, to someone actually typing so... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=02/01/2012&EventID=176 I am still amazed at how slow the web design industry moves. Even in 2002, it was obvious to me that web development and software development are pretty much the same thing - complex scripts that are prone to bugs, security issues, or simply becoming out of date (or demanding new features) as the w... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=30/12/2011&EventID=175 If you submit your website here to botw.org directory today, you will receive 50% off listings (today only) - just enter this voucher code: STUFFED50... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=29/11/2011&EventID=174 I've used this cliché more than once, but it's worth repeating - ask 10 people their opinion on a particular website - in terms of design - and you'll get back 11 opinions. First off, people often confuse the word "design" to only mean aesthetics - the look and feel. That's why you get ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=21/11/2011&EventID=173 Since about 3AM UK time, every website has a page rank of zero (including google.com, bbc.co.uk, facebook.com). This may be a glitch as it's only been a few hours, but if it's a deliberate ditch by Google to do away with PageRank, then this will effectively mean the biggest currency in the SEO indu... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=06/10/2011&EventID=172 Imagine an internet that was a true meritocracy where the best content, best services, and best products naturally got the most coverage in the search engine results. The better your site, the more successful you became. And so you honed your content, perfected your services and products, and reap... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=16/09/2011&EventID=171 The humble website link used to be something that simply connected one page to another. A little blue underlined "click here" that took you "there" because a person genuinely found an interesting website, and thus, with all the wide-eyed innocence of those early days of "cyberspace" (as it was once... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=22/07/2011&EventID=169 Making a website and marketing a website are different disciplines, but they are actually closely related due to the technical nature of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing. You can't develop a website completely oblivious to SEO requirements without causing trouble d... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=30/06/2011&EventID=168 I'm all for championing the underdog, and perhaps I even have a built-in bias against the dominant players in any market. A good example: there's just something wrong when people claim to support Man U just because they're good. It's more interesting to me to see the underdog win and... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=27/06/2011&EventID=167 I've been notified of a voucher code that's valid through June 2011 for the human-review directory - ezilon.com. The voucher code is : s1z8v - using the code will give you 30% off your website submission. You can visit ezilon.com directory here FWIW... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=03/06/2011&EventID=166 I've mentioned before that enthusiasm for the product or service you sell makes your life so much easier:- Marketing Is All About Improving Your Product <a href="http://www.pur... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=18/05/2011&EventID=165 An interesting site here: ie6countdown.com - it is encouraging people to upgrade from IE6 to a more modern browser. The interesting thing about this site is that it's Microsoft who have published this - they want people to stop using IE6 as it's insecure, does... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=05/03/2011&EventID=164 botw.org are offering 20% off listings this month on their directory - just enter the code FEB20 when submitting your site for a 20% discount. I'd count botw.org in the top 3 directories in terms of passing authority o... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=02/02/2011&EventID=163 With nearly 14 years of building websites - from simple one pagers to full e-commerce, I've seen many wesites both succeed and fail online. While it's human nature to focus on what's successful, it's also important to know what methods create problems. By the way, I include here my own ventures th... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=27/01/2011&EventID=162 So it's finally happened - the first Page Rank update by Google update since 2nd April 2010 (on the day Google announce Larry Page, which Page Rank is actually named after, is becoming the new CEO of Google). While it's almost a stock reaction by web developers and SEOs alike to say that Page Ran... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=21/01/2011&EventID=161 First off, there's a great deal on at business.com - listings are just $149 per year to get listed (half price down from $299 per year) - this is one of the high quality directories that will ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=28/12/2010&EventID=160 There's a new type of photo gallery available for the puresilva website template - the "Search Engine Friendly Gallery". You can select it in backoffice > photo gallery (within the template):- Here you ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=19/11/2010&EventID=159 Google has slowly but surely relegated its actual search results further and further down the page over the years. Actually, in 2010, if you browse in common resolutions like 1024 x 768 or 1280 x 800 you'll barely see the top organic search result just peeking its nose above the "fold" (the top ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=12/10/2010&EventID=158 It's been a good 6 months since the last major PageRank update (early April). July came and went without an update, and now October is showing a conspicuous silence from the Chocolate Factory over at Mountain View. There's no gifts to bear to those poor new sites stuck on PR0 that've been live f... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=10/10/2010&EventID=157 When you post something new on your blog, you want the search engines to pick up this new article/content as soon as possible. A high speed of indexing indicates that search engine spiders like your site, and therefore visit it often hoping to find new content. One way to help search engines "lear... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=01/09/2010&EventID=156 A while ago I wrote about push and pull marketing and how the market has moved away from push to pull i.e. cold calling and interrupting people (push) is less effective because it's gotten much easier for people ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=30/06/2010&EventID=155 This is a bit of a false dilemma of course as you don't need to choose between :-Selling with a puresilva website ORSelling on a platform like eBay....you can sell on both of course, but let's compare the two. Costspuresilva website £250 purchase cost f... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=23/06/2010&EventID=154 Here are 5 mistakes websites still make in 2010 - I call them mistakes because they just get in the way of the visitor. Talking like a brochureTalking as if you're the CEO of some international conglomerate when in fact you're simply a one-man-band selling t-shirts makes you sound ridiculo... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=01/06/2010&EventID=153 Do you already have a website? Maybe you have an e-commerce or content managed website already, but are considering using the puresilva website template for your current domain name. The problem is - many people who come to puresilva say "I already have an e-commerce site but I'm not happy with ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=14/05/2010&EventID=152 When we think of links, it's normally in a selfish way: we want to GET links to point to our website, and we will only GIVE links if there's some kind of quid pro quo involved. A reciprocal link exchange, or some kind of exchange going on. We want some quid for the quo we give... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=11/04/2010&EventID=151 One thing a lot of people overlook when considering a new website is hosting. An afterthought is usually paid to hosting only after all the functions are developed for the website (and it's the functions and "look and feel" that people primarily focus on when planning their new website). Google... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=22/03/2010&EventID=150 If you've installed Google Translate on your website, try converting your English language site to German, then check your product prices:- Your English language site showing pounds sterling...<img src="http://www.puresilva.com/images/google_translate1.gif" alt="google translate 1" border=... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=28/02/2010&EventID=149 If my inbox is anything to go by, SEO is a huge growth market because I'm now getting around 10-15 mails a day (across my mailboxes) promising me better rankings from various service providers. Where are all these companies coming from? I guess it's because technically, there's almost no barrier t... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=23/02/2010&EventID=148 With incremental update releases happening on at least a weekly basis to the template, the version number has been ticking over like an odometer. So it's really more incidental than anything else that the version number has now reached 3.00. Between 2.00 and 3.00, <a href="http://www.puresilva... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=09/02/2010&EventID=146 I get this question asked a lot by potential customers. Not directly about the prices I quote, but about prices quoted from other website developers they've spoken to. And I end up sort-of defending the other developers as to why they charge so much. If I had the same business model as your ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=31/01/2010&EventID=145 It's tough starting out with a brand new domain and no websites linking to you. So we're now offering anyone who signs up to our template 100 free one-way links. This will include 3 PR3 links too (guaranteed). It's a helping push to get your site firstly indexed quickly and on its way to ranking ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=20/01/2010&EventID=144 I've been busy developing a new online tool - restylr.com This (free) tool allows you to edit website templates online, adding your own banner, changing images, font sizes, colours, font types etc. You can then save your new design as a .zip file. What you... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=11/01/2010&EventID=143 One dilemma a lot of people have with selling online is whether to take credit/debit card payments directly on their site, or to delegate this job and send shoppers to a 3rd party payment processor (e.g. WorldPay, PayPal) to deal with the payment on their site. The advantages with taking payment ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=24/12/2009&EventID=142 Launching a new website means you're often stuck in the purgatory of "option paralysis" - a seemingly infinite amount of design choices you must pick from in order to get your website up and running: what colour sheme to choose?which fonts to use?deciding on a logo / banner... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=18/12/2009&EventID=141 Traditional push marketing of a product or service involves proactively telling your target market about your product/service. It typically involves direct marketing like emailshots, phone calls and generally interrupting your target market using one media or another, to persuade them to do what you... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=30/11/2009&EventID=140 As Seth Godin wisely points out, everyone is clueless :- The problem with "ever... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=27/11/2009&EventID=139 If you introduced regulations to the web design industry, you'd likey see 90+% of web design companies disappear overnight as they're judged "unfit for purpose". Never has the phrase "you get what you pay for" been LESS true than when considering what people pay when they ask for a website to be de... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=26/11/2009&EventID=138 It's been a while since this was updated, but here it is pimped to deal with the stress equations of selling online in 2009:- Selling Online Successfully Guide... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=24/11/2009&EventID=137 If you haven't heard of him, you have a LOT of (essential) reading to catch up on! >> Seth Godin's Blog... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=07/11/2009&EventID=136 After a recent PageRank update, it appears the home page of puresilva.com has a PageRank of 6. Is PR important? It is and it isn't. There's not much relationship between high PR and ranking well in search engines. But high PR combined with obviously well-honed content and good inbound links a... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=31/10/2009&EventID=135 Why use an FAQ?Because it allows you to anticipate, and then answer your visitors questions right there and then and you can save your visitor hunting around for the answer to commonly asked questions!Any other benefits?Well, it allows you to have a kind of dialogue with the visito... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=15/10/2009&EventID=134 Pay-for-review directories are a great way to increase your search engine rankings, since they are reviewed by humans, and if you fail the review, your site is not included. That sounds risky, but it's not if your site is not disreputable in any way. THAT may sound odd, but from a search engine's ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=11/10/2009&EventID=133 Another tool added to the (completely free) puresilva toolbox:- Keyword Suggestion Tool This tool allows you to find alternative keywords that are being used by searchers to find things. These keywords are useful because they ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=28/09/2009&EventID=132 Just type the first few letters of a root keyword you're targeting into Google like the image above. Google will suggest keywords based on those first few letters. You will often find a few surprises in these lists that Google suggests. You can be assured that these are keyphrases that are popula... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=25/09/2009&EventID=131 My personal favorite to make your own banner is PureSilva’s BannerMaker. Although there are a ton of available options, the interface remai... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=22/09/2009&EventID=130 I get a load of emails everyday from SEO "companies" asking me to sign up to their services. The problem is - the vast majority never even leave a link to a website, or proof of previous work. They are making a bunch of promises in their email, which is normally sent from a GMail address, and that... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=18/09/2009&EventID=129 A new facility allows puresilva template owners to make money from visitor-published adverts on their website. These come in the form of text ads, and site owners can choose how much they charge for such ads on a monthly basis. More in the FAQ:- Advertisements o... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=09/09/2009&EventID=128 A great article by Jeff Atwood over at codinghorror.com on the error of applying "business-speak" to your website:- <img src="http://www.auditmywebsite.co.uk... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=04/09/2009&EventID=127 It's easy to focus too much on quantity of visitors coming to your website, and not so much on the QUALITY. After all, quantity is very easy to measure, quality a little less so. Search engine visitors tend to be high quality since they are visiting with intent. For example, they already typed... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=02/09/2009&EventID=126 Hosting is an important aspect of your online business. It's often an afterthought for many people, with the assumption being that there's no real difference between the various hosting companies, unless one has a particularly bad reputation. We have invested a lot of time and effort into host... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=28/08/2009&EventID=125 Five years ago today (27th July 2004), I launched the shoptemplate.co.uk demo shop. This has now evolved into puresilva.com (v2.76 as of today). <a href="ht... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=27/07/2009&EventID=124 I've been offering the puresilva template to people for a monthly flat fee of £20. It's not the first time I've experimented with a low monthly price. It seems I introduce a monthly payment plan every year, but then discontinue it after 4 or 5 months :) Why? Because I think it simply doesn't wo... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=25/07/2009&EventID=123 It's now possible to sell affilaite products on puresilva for any outlet (Amazon, John Lewis, any website). More information in updates.... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=23/07/2009&EventID=122 Microsoft are doing it again regarding referral spam. They are sending false "visitors" to your site who supposedly found your site on the Bing search engine using single keyword searches like "item", "dollar", "product", and even "general"(!). It's quickly apparent these are false visitors (i.e. ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=19/07/2009&EventID=121 A biased look at what it is to be formal and informal :) Formal/OrthodoxYou adopt well-worn phrases when describing your services - a lexicon of commonly understood jargon, and you follow the well worn path of recognised thinking in your industryYou find a way to shoehorn ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=17/07/2009&EventID=120 Here are planned updates to the puresilva website template - planned to implemented (all of them) by end of 2009:- Ability to sell affiliate productsThis will allow the site owner to add a product as normal, including 4 images, product name, description etc but with an afiliate link inst... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=14/07/2009&EventID=119 PageRank is fast becoming meaningless as a way to judge the value of a page. It doesn't take into account the amount of traffic the page gets, which I think is a big signal for a search engine. Traffic measuring sites like Alexa are a good way to judge a website. The higher the traffic, the more... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=05/06/2009&EventID=118 The backoffice of the puresilva website template is going to undergo some big updates over the next month or so. To start off, the "variables" section has had a long overdue update:- <a href="http://www... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=25/05/2009&EventID=117 Probably the most contentious issue I face with web development is aesthetics : the "look and feel" of a website. Ask 10 people what's a good colour scheme, layout, font etc and you'll get back 11 opinions. I can hear the response already : "so what - design is subjective isn't it? Of course y... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=14/05/2009&EventID=116 A couple of years ago I wrote an article about trust (How to look like a trusted website). The article title seems a bit dodgy - surely if you ARE trustworthy, then you will LOOK trustworthy? Not alway... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=13/05/2009&EventID=115 Expired domains are a great way to jump start a new online business, or even give an extra push to an existing business. How so? Well, Expired domains are interesting for two reasons:- Arguably, all the best domain names have already been thought of (I did say arguably!). So expired doma... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=20/04/2009&EventID=114 Now on the puresilva template when you add a new article or product to your website you can check a box that says "auto tweet" and it will automatically add a message to Twitter with the title of your article/product and a link to it (shortened automatically). This new feature is entirely optio... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=17/04/2009&EventID=113 The following article assumes you don't have wheelbarrows of cash to throw at Google Adwords and advertising to bring traffic to your website (even if you do, this is a useful article for increasing your profit margins). There still is this perception with selling online that once you laun... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=11/04/2009&EventID=110 Twitter's search facility still displays messages you've deleted even up to 3 days ago (as of today, test messages I made 3 days ago are still visible in the Twitter search). I can only guess the search facility is using a caching syste... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=07/04/2009&EventID=109 It seems we are being dragged into the "Twittersphere" by our collar these days:- ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=08/04/2009&EventID=108 Twitter is becoming an extremely popular means of communicating online, but a constant problem people have when sending a "tweet" (a message) are URLs - URLs take up too much of that precious 140 characters you're allowed per message. So to make the most of those 140 characters, people use a UR... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=05/04/2009&EventID=107 WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors are nothing new, but the annoying thing with all the ones we've tried is they don't resize image files when you resize the physical size of them in the editor. So you upload a 2MB image, then in the WYSIWYG editor you physically reduce the size ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=12/03/2009&EventID=106 We've set the price of the puresilva website template to £250. This gives you the full template, including e-commerce facilities. This is quite a significant reduction from the previous price (which held for 2 years) at £395. The new price of £250 will hold throughout 2009 and 2010, with a price r... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=02/03/2009&EventID=105 Capitalising on the poor state of health the average UK citizen seems to find themselves in these days (blame the weather), nutritionfriend.com offer health advice online and offline, particularly <a href="http://www.nutritionfriend.com/Pregnancy-Diet-Pr... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=14/02/2009&EventID=104 An interesting experiment conducted by Google shows users notice even half a second delay in page loads, and this results in a reduction in traffic and revenue by 20%:- <table cellpadding=8 cellspacing=1... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=05/02/2009&EventID=103 We've launched our own site crawler which crawls all 100+ puresilva websites and finds the latest products / articles added and lists them here. Each site is crawled once per 3 hours 24/7, so our own engine crawls our sites faster than... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=29/01/2009&EventID=102 canvastown.com have been running for over 3 years, and in the last 18 months or so, have specialised in selling Banksy canvas art. A physical shop in the financial district of London has sprung up on the success of th... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=27/01/2009&EventID=101 Walk-in Backrub have 5 London massage Centres, where they offer no appointment massage and a great range of massage products. They have been selling massage tools and Back Massagers sourced from ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=26/01/2009&EventID=100 The assumption is that everyone is in business for money. The assumption is a pretty good one, since it's true much of the time. We do / sell things in exchange for money. In fact, some people will think asking "why are you running a business?" is a rhetorical question. But there doesn't have t... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=19/01/2009&EventID=98 If you don't know what an autodidact is, but your first impulse is to find out yourself, YOU may be an autodidact. I'll save you the search:- autodidact – noun a person who has learned a subject without the benefit of a teacher ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=16/01/2009&EventID=97 I've had time to do some updates to the banner maker:-You can now preview both background and foreground images (makes things much quicker since you can see the images you are using before previewing, and you can also browse the image l... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=13/12/2008&EventID=96 You can see at the top of this page a new link: "What are they talking about?!". Here's an FAQ about it...... What is "What are they talking about?!"It's a news aggregator - it takes a selection of RSS feeds and publishes a selection... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=04/12/2008&EventID=95 This is a great free tool to find keywords (from Google):- Google Search-based Keyword Tool. Enter your website domain name, and the facility lists keyphrases that people are actually using to find sites similar to your own - ordered b... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=01/12/2008&EventID=94 I've set-up a puresilva shop at cafepress.com where you can buy all kinds of merchandise with our logo embossed on it. I think it's more a case of me liking the logo on nice looking gear than anyone actually interested in buying anything. Anyway here's the shop:- <a href="http://www.cafepress.c... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=29/11/2008&EventID=93 At last puresilva now has a youtube channel, and I have uploaded 16 tutorial videos (on how to use the website template) to it:- youtube.com/puresilva I'll be uploading a lot more videos in the coming days - for example:-How to use the pur... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=27/11/2008&EventID=92 Our own experience and feedback from some of our clients shows that Google Adsense is paying out very little these days - talking about 10 cents a click typically, no matter what the content on the page. Click-through rates are slowly diminishing too. Publishers have slowly been paid less and... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=11/11/2008&EventID=91 Here is an example of contextual links:- The green underlined text are contextual links - links within a body of text. Search engines love these types of links and for that love, they reward such links wit... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=09/11/2008&EventID=90 Here are my predictions for the next few years. These are all generalisations. And guesses. So take with a pinch of salt and enjoy:- More people will go self-employed/start up their own businesses as they realise that large corporations no longer offer the safety of employment they once ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=05/11/2008&EventID=89 Looks like Obama all the way......but wait, what's this?! <PARAM NAME=movie VALUE="http://www.tsgvid.com/video/mai... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=03/11/2008&EventID=88 I've written a lot about search engine optimization on this blog, but I think it's about time to consolidate the latest SEO techniques into one convenient article! The purpose of this article is to teach you the most effective, legitimate ways to achieve high rankings in the search engines for your ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=27/10/2008&EventID=87 We now offer a free service for all of our customers - a Google sitemap of their website created and submitted to Google. This helps Google understand the structure of their website and in turn has a positive effect on the rankings of that website. This service used to cost £50 - now completely fr... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=11/10/2008&EventID=86 Many updates are scheduled for the puresilva website template are planned over the next few months (in no particular order):- PollsFacility to allow you to add polling questions to website visitors. Those who vote can see results via graphical barchart. Easy "disable shopping facilit... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=22/09/2008&EventID=85 Our Banner Maker has recently gone through a number of improvements:- You can apply bordering effects to imagesDither filterAlter opacity of imagesFor images, you can saturate, super-staturate, or make them b... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=14/09/2008&EventID=84 Google have rolled out the new Suggest feature on Google.com (see screenshot). This COULD impact search in the following ways:- Less misspelled searchesLess long tail searches as people opt for suggestions rather than type in a longer keyphraseNaturally, more searches b... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=27/08/2008&EventID=83 We've just launched our new photo editor tool:- Photo Editor Tool Here you can resize, re-color, apply filters, watermark and write text on top of any of your photos!... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=25/08/2008&EventID=82 Dofollow blogs are blogs which do not use the rel="nofollow" tag. In other words, if you get a link from a Dofollow blog to your website, search engines will count this link toward your own website's link popularity. So how to find thse Dofollow blogs? And how would I go about adding a link to... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=23/08/2008&EventID=81 A new web tool is available on puresilva.com :- Inbound Link Evaluator Tool This tool allows you to view the value of inbound links to any website. It's free for anyone to use and you can find out the value of up to 200 links to any g... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=17/08/2008&EventID=80 A new "upsell" facility has been added to the puresilva website template. This allows online sellers to "upsell" items in a number of different ways:- Volume discounts, or even promotions like two for the price of oneSuggest additional items like a lens cleaners for the camera the... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=20/07/2008&EventID=79 Our links pages search engine now lists over 1000 quality links pages. This is a great archive for those looking for quality links pages to add their link to. We determine quality by:- How many clicks is the links page f... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=16/07/2008&EventID=78 These are the planned new features to be installed over the coming months to the puresilva website template:- "Best Of The Web" FeatureJust select your favourite website RSS feeds, and this facility will generate headlines/summaries (including thumbnails) with the latest news from these ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=15/07/2008&EventID=77 First, a quick history lesson about the puresilva website template:- Back on July 27th 2004, "shoptemplate" was launched (http://www.shoptemplate.co.uk/). It was a robust e-commerce template that did what it said on the tin. It focused heavily on e-... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=20/06/2008&EventID=76 It is now possible for puresilva website template owners to import unlimited products to their website via a text file. This means the possibility of importing thousands of products in just a few minutes. Features include:-Ability to import product images (up to 4) - just expres... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=19/06/2008&EventID=75 Our own website template comes with its own website visitor metrics, but it does allow site owners to easily plug-in Google Analytics and Site Meter stats packages. This article is a comparison between puresilva's own stats facilities against Google Analytics (GA):- puresilva StatsPo... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=16/06/2008&EventID=74 With the ever-increasing volume of affiliate, re-seller and spam websites appearing online, people are getting more cynical and discerning as to which sites they are willing to spend their time and money on. These types of sites just want your money, and they're not shy about letting you know this.... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=25/05/2008&EventID=73 There are 5 basic steps to converting a complete stranger into a repeat customer:- 1. Effective Marketing - which brings visitors to your website 2. Quality Content - your marketing works, and you've got an audience. Now you need to give a good first impression: do they like what... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=22/04/2008&EventID=72 puresilva was launched 2 years ago today. During this time, puresilva has evolved through a series of continual updates, with over 100 websites now running under the template. We are looking forward to the next 2 years and further improvements, new facilities and new customers! :)... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=09/04/2008&EventID=71 We get a lot of enquiries from people who already own a website, and are interested in our website template. Generally speaking, people want to change their website when they're not satisfied with the results they're getting from their current site. When we ask them what's wrong with their current... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=07/03/2008&EventID=69 We are now showing all the latest updates to our website template here - or from the link just below our logo at the top of this page ("see what's new!"). We will refresh this list every time there's new updates to our website template... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=24/02/2008&EventID=68 We've just launched our link pages search engine allowing you to find genuine quality link pages to place your link on. These link pages have scored 7 (out of 10) or higher using our <a href="http://www.puresilva.com/links_page_che... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=13/02/2008&EventID=67 We've launched a new Affiliate Program allowing you to earn a nice residual income. All you have to do is sign-up here (for free) and then link to our site. Any referrals from your li... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=01/02/2008&EventID=66 A new tool has been added to our website "toolbox" - the Link Verifier. This is to save you time browsing link partner pages to see if your link is present. Just enter the URL of th... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=21/01/2008&EventID=65 This article talks about Google Webmaster Tools. You'll need a Google account to use GWT - you can sign up to a free Google account here if you haven't already done so. If you're already logged in, you can find Webmaster Tools from this li... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=17/01/2008&EventID=64 It's easy to concentrate too much on search engine rankings while ignoring the value of repeat traffic - those who find your site for the first time, LIKE it, and subscribe to your RSS feed, bookmark your site, or simply make a mental note to return to your site soon to see what's new. The bigge... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=11/01/2008&EventID=63 First off, I wrote a news entry at the beginning of January 2007 citing all the plans for the puresilva template and the puresilva.com website. How did it go? Well v2.0 of the template was released which ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=04/01/2008&EventID=62 This article assumes you have SOME knowledge regarding link popularity and link building for your website. It's an introduction to deep links. What is a "deep link"?Quite simply, a deep link is a link pointing to a page on your website that isn't your home page. For example, if you... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=12/12/2007&EventID=61 Google Checkout has been included as a means for shoppers to pay on a puresilva website. The puresilva website owner must first make sure he/she has a Google Checkout account. Shoppers must also have a Google Checkout account to pay for their goods. Google Checkout can be used as a cheaper al... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=10/12/2007&EventID=60 We have just launched a new shopping portal (meanshopper.com). The portal will display a large range of items from a number of different sellers, from electric bikes to <a href="http://www.meanshopper.com/Fashion/Lad... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=27/10/2007&EventID=59 From today, website owners in the US who make money from Google Ads can also install "video ads" onto their website. The videos are taken from youtube.com, and ads are placed above and below the video. Website owner, video maker, and Google all take a share of the money if an ad above or below the... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=10/10/2007&EventID=58 Our Recommended Links Pages Directory was launched some time ago, but without much promotion. So, we'd like to remind you again of this because you can get yourself multiple free one-way links by adding your speci... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=06/10/2007&EventID=57 New features have been added to the 2nd version of the puresilva website template:- Product Reviews Digital Products Also we've great... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=05/10/2007&EventID=56 Since our last post, we have been busy adding new features to our new website template release - which will now be full-blown "version 2" of our puresilva template. We'll launch it towards the end of September/early Octob... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=02/09/2007&EventID=55 The news has been quiet here as we have been deep in development, creating a new service which will launch sometime in Autumn 2007 - it's a kind of hybrid between our freeform service and our <a href="http://www.puresilva.c... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=25/07/2007&EventID=54 We have just developed a new facility - now being trialled on planetfashionsuk.com - allowing website visitors to bid on items being sold. More details here.... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=09/07/2007&EventID=53 This facility allows you to check the Page Rank of any web page. Nothing new there, but there's more! It generates an image that can be placed on the page that's being checked, proving the PR value (because the image has a link back to the Page Rank Checker and instantly updates/confirms the Pa... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=04/07/2007&EventID=52 We've launched our new recommended link partners directory here. You can add your own links page to our directory if you score 6/10 or higher according to our link page ch... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=16/06/2007&EventID=51 We have just developed a new tool to check the value of a prospective link partner's link page - you can find this facility here :- Link page checker tool. ExplanationWhen considering a website to exchange links with, you want to ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=09/06/2007&EventID=50 We have just released a new option available to puresilva e-commerce websites - the ability to add tabbed navigation to the website (see above image as example). For puresilva website owners, this is very simple to install - just select 'tabbed browsing' in the design area of the backoffice, and... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=29/05/2007&EventID=49 We have just launched our own manual directory submission service - a quick way to get 62 one-way links to your site for just £29.95. All web directories have a minimum PageRank (PR) of 4 (home page of web directory) so they are... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=21/05/2007&EventID=48 Below is a list of directories we recommend for link building. We've found that links within each directory get indexed by search engines (an obvious necessity), and also the links themselves feature quite highly in search results (e.g. if you search for your domain name - whatever.co.uk - in Googl... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=19/05/2007&EventID=47 This site offers a very fast way to see where you (and your competitors) rank in a variety of keywords:- http://www.seodigger.com/... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=18/05/2007&EventID=46 It's a good idea to understand how your PR (PageRank) value spreads throughout the pages of your site. The page with the highest PR on your website is most likely to be the home page as this is the page that has the most external links pointing to it. The pages within your site that are linked... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=13/05/2007&EventID=45 The following are search engines that rely on humans (not algorithms) to determine the ranking of results. TallStreet.com AfterVote.com <a href="http://www.tallstreet.com/introduction.php"... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=07/05/2007&EventID=44 When people talk about search engines in 2007, they might give a passing reference to Yahoo! and MSN, but really they are talking about Google, because that's where the majority of searchers are to be found. When one search engine dominates the market, and they use an algorithm to determine its r... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=28/04/2007&EventID=43 A good backlink checker tool we found:- http://www.backlinkwatch.com/ It's a little slow, but that's because it's thorough. You get the page rank of each link to your site and the anchor text used. We found it to be a useful tool in seeing the back... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=15/04/2007&EventID=42 The more websites you visit, the more accurate your 'trust radar' gets. You can see if a website owner is enthusiastic or not about his business. You can see the signs that a site is no longer being looked after, or conversely if it is being updated regularly. These signs get more and more obvio... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=11/04/2007&EventID=41 A follow-on from the previous post about Google Adsense, here's a summary of how to help search engines categorise and identify the nature of your page's content (remember, spiders want to identify individual pages and find out what they're about). Here's a quick dialogue between your page and ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=03/04/2007&EventID=40 If you are running Google Adsense on your website, and aren't getting a high click through rate (CTR), it's probably because the ads are on a page that doesn't have a strong theme - which can lead to inappropriate ads/public service ads shown on your page. So, make sure your pages are strongly them... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=25/03/2007&EventID=38 Following up from our previous entry about reciprocal linking, here's a quick check-list to appraise potential website link partners (i.e. websites to swap links with):- Prospective link partner has..... a website that is relevant to what you sell / do a prominent link from the... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=23/03/2007&EventID=37 Reciprocal linking is a big part of your SEO (search engine optimization) campaign for your website. Here we list some do's and don'ts to encourage quality, relevant websites to link to you. The following tips will add value to your links pages, which is what quality link partners are looking for.... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=16/03/2007&EventID=36 Our e-commerce solution now supports multiple currencies. Visitors will see product prices in their local currency automatically like this:- £1.95 (136.52 THB) The above example shows an item price in GBP with Thai baht in brackets - visitors who are identified as coming from Thailand will se... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=28/02/2007&EventID=34 Earlier we wrote about CAPTCHA as a way to prevent automated posting for online forms. The obvious disadvantage to CAPTCHA is it requires a further action from the user, and CAPTCHA text is not always readable to those ev... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=06/02/2007&EventID=32 If you are running Google Ads, you may be wondering WHO is clicking on your adverts. Here is an interesting article on 'click fraud':- ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=01/02/2007&EventID=31 Some websites are like meandering anecdotes, when you just want to know the punchline. Often it's a price you're looking for, or whether they stock a specific item or do a particular service. Can you find it? Often the answer is no. You look at the website navigation....it sounds like a sales bro... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=31/01/2007&EventID=30 Easy business models tempt a lot of people. By 'easy', they usually mean most or all of the following:- product / service with obvious mass market demand low cost to set-up and run the business not much time or skills needed to run the business It all sound... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=29/01/2007&EventID=29 The less vertical space for the 'header area', the better. In plain-English, the header area is the top part of the page that normally holds your company logo and the main navigation of the site (just like the top of this page). <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Eng... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=26/01/2007&EventID=28 Here is the same watch, displayed in two different ways:- 1. Click here to enlar... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=24/01/2007&EventID=26 The most likely place for a visitor to abandon their purchase on an e-commerce website is right at the point of payment. This is often attributed to an attack of conscience - the need to save money being greater than the desire to spend it. There's no doubt we all go through a dilemma of sorts be... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=23/01/2007&EventID=25 Let's hope Google score higher next time - choice is good for customers if bad for PayPal. Google Checkout ranked far below payment service Pay... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=22/01/2007&EventID=24 A useful extension for Firefox:- SEO for Firefox This allows you to find all kinds of things out about each domain listed in either Google or Yahoo! when you do a search. Find out all this about each domain:- PR Google Cache Date ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=21/01/2007&EventID=23 By offering exclusive information or product offers not available on your website via weekly emailings, you can entice people to sign up to your mailing list. This gives you the chance to keep a regular connection between you and your (potential) customers. If you're truly stuck with what to of... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=20/01/2007&EventID=22 Plain-English guide / jargon refresher: SEO stands for Search Engine Optimis(z)ation; it's the practice of altering your website's content (to 'optimise' it) so as to give it higher rankings in the search engine results pages for particular keywords / keyphrases. This is coupled with a campaign ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=19/01/2007&EventID=21 According to Actinic's latest annual survey, 90% of company web sites are profitable; and on average, companies that implement ecommerce find it c... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=18/01/2007&EventID=20 From lots of user feedback, we've greatly improved our banner maker facility. Updates:- - you can now upload your own images - you can position uploaded/chosen images horizontally and vertically - banners can be any size between 100 ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=17/01/2007&EventID=19 You can find out where you rank with our new facility launched a few days ago:- Search Engine Rank Checker It checks the top-100 results in Google and stores the results in a grid so you can compare results over days, weeks and months ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=16/01/2007&EventID=18 Imagine one day you flip on your PC, log on to the Internet and go to Google.com. The browser alerts you and says that there's no website found at... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=15/01/2007&EventID=17 A good search engine optimization forum worth bookmarking and reading regularly is SEOChat.com. You can normally get answers to your questions within minutes by either using the keyword search to find similar questions already answered, or joining the forum ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=14/01/2007&EventID=16 Rather than going to individual websites to read individual blogs, more and more people are going to websites like Digg.com to read stuff that other users have recommended. This acts like a 'best of the web' filter via users 'digging' (voting for) the best blog art... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=13/01/2007&EventID=15 A good online business plan can still fail from poor web design / hosting. When considering which web design company to choose, you should play 'web design bingo' - we consider a 'full house' to be web design companies that at least mention the following in their specific sales pitch to you:- ... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=12/01/2007&EventID=14 There are a lot of things to consider before launching an online business - the most primary being the business model itself - what is the purpose of the website? What are the chances of this purpose being fulfilled? If it's to sell running shoes, then that particular online market should be ex... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=11/01/2007&EventID=13 It's a good idea to colour-code the links on your website so your visitors know which links they've already clicked on. This might sound like the most obvious thing in the world, but it's a usability guide that many web designers eschew on their own websites (let alone mere mortals). People of... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=10/01/2007&EventID=12 Some of our own tips can be read here. Also to augment our own advice, here is an interesting article for more online selling advice, including:- <img src="http://www... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=09/01/2007&EventID=11 RSS is technology - a simple software program - that allows you to access web and blog content automatically. The acronym's most popular translati... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=08/01/2007&EventID=10 Plain English Guide: 80/20 refers to this :- When optimizing your website for search engines, spend 20% of your time with optimizing your actual web pages - i.e. the content and the HTML, and 80% of your time swapping links with other websites. OK, that's it put in quite plain terms indeed... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=07/01/2007&EventID=9 When you see search results, you normally see them formatted like this:- Acme Hiphop For all the latest hip-hop records and clothing http://www.acmehiphop.co.uk The blue text is actually taken from the HTML page... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=06/01/2007&EventID=8 Plain English Alert: The term 'vertical search' really means a search engine that is specific to a particular subject. For example, a search engine that only returned results from Beatles tribute we... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=05/01/2007&EventID=7 We have a number of new, significant updates planned for puresilva in 2007, as well as the puresilva.com website. We have two new facilities planned for the puresilva.com site for non-customers :- - search engine rank checker for a user's domain - <a href="http:/... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=04/01/2007&EventID=6 Background info:- CAPTCHA stands for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" - you see it when you fill in online forms that have a security code you enter, just before submitting the form (just like the attached... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=03/01/2007&EventID=5 When typing in keywords like 'blog' in Google, you'll see what looks like a sponsored link to Blogger.com - until you realise Google recently bought Blogger - so it's actually some self-advertising. This is apparently happening more often on a number of searches - with a number of Google's purchase... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=02/01/2007&EventID=4 The murky world of the malicious website 'undeveloper' is an ever creative one, and many new threats are 'promised' for this year. <descriptio... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=01/01/2007&EventID=3 Search Engine Optimization strategies change from time-to-time, but quality content is a constant necessity for promoting and keeping visitors to your website. The following article shows that search engines are suffering somewhat at the moment from being TOO automated in determining the ranking... http://www.puresilva.com/blog.asp?date=31/12/2006&EventID=1