Polaroid are to stop making the film for their iconic cameras (they stopped making them last year).

A client asked me to put their fax number on their website this week. When’s the last time you sent or received a fax?

Our design company in Basingstoke is ten years old in April. When my partner Rob and I started off, under the staircase, we got excited about £30 orders for business cards. We used to have to get our films produced in a town 20 miles away, take them to a printer 15 miles away and then deliver them to the client another 15 miles away. Looking back, I wonder how we made money!

Anyway, our industry, like those of the camera and fax world, has also changed. Many litho printers take your files by e-mail, send them straight to plate, or even digitally print. Technology is killing a lot of small industries.

In fact, 2007 was the first time for us that our web revenue has exceeded out revenue from print. Our customers don’t want what they used to. And, If we don’t give them what they want, how they want it, they also have a friend called Google who will tell them anywhere in the world where they can get it.

Competition is getting just that little bit harder… are you flexible enough?

I am always looking for new techniques to increase my pull of natural search traffic. Blogging regularly is one of these and sometimes I am left scratching my head about what to write. More importantly, when I do have a topic, how can I craft it to attract the traffic and convert it into a sale.

One way of attracting traffic is by using keywords in your content. It’s an important part of defining your content. I am not a big one for going over the top with keyword [over] saturation though.

Plain attraction by using keyword saturation is a tactic that works for many affiliate sites, that simply rely on numbers of visitors, but for a business website we are not interested in simply attracting traffic - we want leads, or sales. All to often a company may pop up in the search engine, you visit the site and can’t make head or tail of what they are saying due to improper use of keywords.

The idea of using keywords is this is that you define a key-word, or key-phrase and use it within your content to attract search engine traffic. ie. If a search engine can see your page has the word ‘basingstoke’ in for instance, it can establish that you have a value against that phrase. So, if someone searches for the term, you may appear.

Of course, you are competing with everyone else who wants to be found for the same phrase.

Recent advice is to use Long Tail search terms. These are more specific terms and utilise longer key phrases, “website designer in Basingstoke”.

Keyword Research

You can use free keyword tools, such as Wordtracker or Google… along with everyone else, or you could use variations of the same phrase you want to be found for.

One tip I have never really thought about too much is to craft your Blog posts completely around a key phrase or phrases. It’s not my idea by the way - credit to Om4.

This is exceptionally useful with topical issues that affect your business, or locality based articles. I often take a generic story and put a Basingstoke angle on it for my local Basingstoke Business News website. eg. This story is for a company rolling out broadband in three towns; Basingstoke is just one of them.

This Blogging technique also allows you to build additional anchor text links to your web pages. (anchor text is the text you select as the link to another page - eg. web consultant in Basingstoke).

To find what’s happening for certain key phrases, or in my home town, I often use Google News search and Blog Search. I also use Google Alerts to get updates sent regularly to my e-mail inbox for certain more obscure ‘keywords’.

By taking your topic, or source words, you can begin to craft articles and Blog Posts to answer peoples questions, attract traffic and push it through to your selling pages.

For a business marketing their products and services, either to other businesses or direct to consumers, I fail to see how many are getting value from Adwords and pay-per-click.

I set up some local campaigns for a company this week, ie. “[service] Hampshire”, etc. It’s quite a specific set of key phrases I’ve chosen and the adverts and landing pages are optimised. One of phrases, even with a click bid of 80p, is rated as position 20.8.

You’ve got to have a high value product to make that pay.

I used to run Adwords on the beauty shop. In January, is cost me £220.61 to deliver £255.46 worth of sales. That, is unsustainable. I turned them off and despite the lower level of sales, my profits have inevitably risen.

Google must be laughing and many businesses, I can only surmise, simply don’t get it.

I went to PC World in Basingstoke yesterday. With technology advancements - barcodes, etc. - nothing I was looking for was priced up. The specific things I wanted were also not in the right place.

I wouldn’t moan (or would I) but this is the third time on the trot I have had to ask one of the “I’m more interested in the fact that it is my cigarette break” staff what the price of an item is.

Why don’t you just get me to stock your shelves for you and ring my own products through the till?

I know customer service in the UK is at an all-time low but it’s got beyond a joke. So much so, that I have passed through the barrier of “can I wait for an Amazon order to come?” The funny thing is, PC World have an online price, so it’s more expensive to have to go through the retail ‘experience’!

I’ve had enough. I am now actually adapting my behaviour away from the high street.

Anyway, rant over… my point. Lots of websites are like this, many of them not on purpose, purely through ignorance.

Take your website. Can a visitor find what they want, bearing in mind there may be different motivations going on. Some people may want information on products, some may want to snap in, get your phone number and get out.

Clear navigation, relevant structure and good in-page linking enables movement through your site. Clear labeling of content is also a must in the world of me, me, me.

Searches are also great, but how good is yours? I have noticed more and more, how much website searches lack and at the end of the day, you can’t beat Google. Why not get them to do it for you with a custom search engine?