Member Blog

We’ve mentioned in blogs previously about the use of glossaries, but we thought it would be worth really going into why they’re so important. Glossaries play a huge part in making sure a translation is accurate and that specific terms are not only correct, but also translated and handled in exactly the way you need them to be. In translation industry jargon, they tend to be called a Terminology Base (or a TB), but it’s exactly the same thing.

1. Accuracy

The first reason glossary creation is so important is accuracy. Everyone wants their translations to be 100% accurate. If you work with your language service provider to develop a glossary of industry and/or company specific terms, that may or may not have been translated previously, the translation team is fully equipped to choose the correct term in the target language. Language is very flexible and everyone has different sense of language and uses a different way to refer to the same thing. This is a chance to give translators essential information about what a term means. For example, a ship builder may have their own specific names for elements of their process. Giving translators the best possible insight into what these mean and how they are being used is obviously extremely worthwhile.

2. Brand tone

Glossary creation will also help the translator convey the correct tone for your brand. A good example would be a toy manufacturer. All of their products would have their own brand specific names. Names may already exist in overseas markets for the toys, and the client and language agency should work together to decide on how best to handle the product names for each target market. The more reference materials, explanations and information given to the translator, the better. Translators can study any materials provided and create a high-quality translation written in the tone of your brand.

3. Consistency

Consistency will also improve if a glossary is created prior to translation. A list of key terms, along with their definitions, will help ensure that the correct terms are consistently used throughout the text. In the case of a technical translation, it would be unacceptable for a word to be translated differently each time. A good example might be a user manual for a product, referring to a “screen”. In English, this could be called a display, a visual display unit or a whole range of other terms. Similarly, in other languages there are a range of choices available and a glossary will make sure that the correct choice is made, and that the same term is consistently used throughout all translated materials.

4. Translation Speed

Using a translation glossary can also have an added bonus of speeding up the translation process. In reality, a good translator spends more of their time researching things like phrasing, wording, and background information rather than actual translation. Nailing down terminology can certainly reduce the total time an assignment will take a translator, avoiding unnecessary research or duplication of effort. Equally, just removing the need for a translator to continually type the term over and over again. It’s easy to see why a linguist would be grateful to avoid having to type a word like Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (a medical term for a lung disease) any more than necessary.

How to create a glossary

A glossary is created in collaboration with your translation provider or sometimes created by a client themselves.

The point of a glossary is to improve the quality of the translation, so the selection of words to be put in it needs to be handled with care. A glossary list is based on the rule of Rubbish-in and rubbish-out. A glossary should be followed as gospel, so if the terms that go into the glossary are wrong or not fully considered, it will actually degrade the translation quality. We recommend that you only add specific, technical terms and other types of word you really wish to be translated in a specific way, there’s really no need to add basic or commonly used terms.

Physically creating the glossary is pretty straightforward. The process may differ slightly between different translation providers, but at a basic level, the files is simply a bilingual excel file, as shown below. The safest way to start is by asking your translation company. They should be able to analyse your files, extract terms that may require clarification and get everything set up for you.

Why You Should Be Claiming R&D Tax Credits.

In the current economic climate, it’s still surprising that more businesses don’t explore all of the tax incentives available to help lighten the burden by either reducing tax payable and or if applicable, securing a tax repayment.

If you are a company where you have people and costs associated with project activities aimed at advancing what you do, then you could be eligible for R&D tax credits.

BACKGROUND

Research and Development Tax Credits were launched back in 2000 and the scheme is administered by HMRC. The principle is very straightforward and is a win-win scenario for both the UK economy and the eligible companies. If the government can make it easier through tax relief for companies to invest in innovation, then it is more likely that these companies will undertake innovative projects to benefit their business growth and contribute to the UK’s future success and standing.

The good news is that since its launch the benefits of the scheme have increased significantly, so there has never been a better time to claim.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS?

R&D Tax Relief applies to both profit making companies paying Corporation Tax and also loss-making companies who are not, both are able to claim for eligible activities. Relief can be received as lowered corporation tax or in some cases as a payable cash credit. The calculations are many and varied so the simplest way to help you understand what you might get in the form of SME tax relief (dependent on a number of contributing factors of course) is around 26p for every £1 you have spent on eligible activities.

CAN YOU CLAIM?

This is where HMRC’s terminology can create confusion and probably why so many companies failed to recognise that they were eligible for tax relief, even to this day. In the words of HMRC it was created to benefit companies striving to achieve technical and scientific advances through projects that extend the current industry baseline, and where uncertainty in the outcome exists and the methods used to achieve success are not readily deducible. See what we mean? It’s not particularly clear what’s eligible and what’s not.

The simplest way to finding out whether you may be eligible to claim is asking yourself some questions like: Have we developed new tools, products or services using technology? Have we tried to improve our existing products through technical changes? At the start of a project, did we ever think ‘I’m not sure of the best way to do this’?

HOW CAN YOU CLAIM?

The reality is that there are a number of ways that you can claim for R&D tax relief. You can claim yourself, through your accountant or through a specialist service provider. However, it’s important to understand the implications of your choice and the consequences that can be generated.

The accountant route is often assumed to be the logical choice because it is a tax process. However, estimations show that overall accountants are only claiming for approximately 10% of the potential eligible relief for their clients due to understated claims or claims not being made. The reality is that, if the claim is assessed properly the activity is 80% technically focused. There are some things that accountants are best equipped to manage on behalf of their clients and logically these are all things purely accounting based.

The great majority of accountants are not technical and will not understand what you do, how you do it, the context of your projects and known industry alternatives and therefore generally submit conservative claims that are largely under the legitimate entitlement for the client.

PARTNERSHIP IS THE WAY TO GO

The key is to identify as much eligible expenditure as you can; The more you identify, the greater the value of the relief you’ll receive from HMRC. So the ideal partnership to deliver the best results for any client is the combination of a specialist technical R&D tax relief advisory firm such as Jumpstart, who speaks both your language and HMRC’s; and your accountant. In collaboration they can manage the assessment, preparation and submission on your behalf, ensuring you receive the biggest return for the least possible effort.

Jumpstart is a leading R&D tax relief specialist, guidingcompanies through the complexities of submitting claims to HMRC.

Jumpstart’s large team of technical analysts have specific scientific and technical backgrounds and years of industrial experience which have resulted in an extremely high success rate in securing R&D tax relief for their clients. Since inception eight years ago, they have realised almost £80 million benefit for their clients. Right now, they’re submitting an average of 500 claims per year to HMRC.

For a free R&D tax credit consultation and analysis of the potential returns you might expect, contact your local Client Engagement Manager Lee Williams on 07794201990 or email lee.williams@jumpstartuk.co.uk

When starting a new business venture, a key success factor to establish is your value proposition. It’s also helpful for existing business owners to revisit their value proposition from time to time to help continued business growth.

But what is a value proposition, and how should you go about writing one?

What is a value proposition?

In short, a value proposition is a promise by a company to a customer. It explains:

• what benefits your company provides
• who you provide those benefits for
• how you do it uniquely well.

Your value proposition should be focused on delivering unique and sustainable value to your ideal customer.

Why do you need a value proposition?

As an internal tool, a value proposition helps make sure employees and management are aligned by understanding the benefit the company is trying to deliver. It helps everyone focus on the aspects of the business that make the biggest difference. A strong value proposition can therefore help you avoid wasting time, money and energy.

The right value proposition reveals the connection between your products and your potential customers’ goals. Being clear on that will give you the confidence and clarity you need for continued development and innovation of your products and business processes whilst maintaining profit. It should also give you the basic wording for your marketing messages, focusing on the few things that make the biggest difference.

How to write a good value proposition

Before writing your value proposition, you need to be absolutely clear on why a customer should buy from you. You should have a clear understanding and commitment that your product or service will add value to a target audience. Thinking about the following might help:

• Customer Needs and Insights:Are you able to solve problems, reduce costs or increase sales?
• Added Value:Are you able to add value to your customer?
• Unique Selling Point:Is your product or service innovative or are you able to offer a point of differentiation over your competitor?
• Proof:Can you create trust and quantify the benefits so that the customer believes you?
• Customer satisfaction:How are you going to exceed expectations?

Alongside this, make sure you consider all the risks in your business and be realistic with your financial expectations. Return on investment must always be at the forefront, but do not forget the importance of cash flow and the resource time required to administer. However creative you may be, I strongly recommend that you formalise a project plan or sales forecast before you get too far down the road. Key milestones and the introduction of measures will help ensure that you stay on track or adjust to compensate for any deviations caused by obstacles.

Once you’re confident that you have a product or service people want, and is financially sustainable, it’s time to write your value proposition.

When writing your value proposition it’s important to remember that it’s for people to quickly read and understand. So keep it clear and concise and avoid jargon. Try to use the type of language your customers use. You need to address:

• What is it you’re offering?
• Who is it for?
• What problem does it solve?
• How is it useful? What is its key problem-solving capability?
• How is it unique?

Structure-wise, aim for a strong headline that grabs attention, and one short paragraph to explain what you do, for whom and why it’s useful. You may also have a sub-heading, three bullet points or a visual. There’s no set format, just keep it focused.

How to use your value proposition

Having a great value proposition isn’t enough. You need to use it!

Firstly, make sure everyone within the business knows what it is. Then use it to target the customers who will benefit most from your product or service.

Make sure your customers can see it. If it’s carefully considered and well written, put it front and centre on your website homepage – it should help potential customers quickly understand why they should use your company.

You may find that you need one value proposition for your business and then a series of propositions for individual product lines. That’s fine, just apply the same logic to each.

For starters, you might look a little confused whilst you make sure that you are in fact in the right log file, but then you knuckle down and find out what the issue is and how you can fix it.

I was faced with the above problem very recently and I can tell you, it’s a bit of a pain to solve sometimes. To add a bit of context, a client sent us an email saying that they had tried to run a piece of functionality on some software we are developing for them and had been given the typical “Sorry, an error has occurred” message on their page. That’s okay, in development sometimes bugs come up that we need to fix. I take a stroll into the server logs, expecting to see the error and have a quick fix for it. What do I find? Nothing, actually. Nothing that relates to the error, anyway. Rewind back to the first section of this post about looking a little confused for a while, that was me.

After realising that I probably wasn’t going to get anywhere looking at the server logs, I decided to fire up a development instance of the project, retrace the steps the client made and find the error message there instead. Because of the UI not being completely finished, it took quite some time to follow the steps (as it is a case of clicking checkboxes and adding values to arrays, more on that later) but alas, I got to the stage of being ready to submit the form. I hit submit, and the age old error message pops up. This time, however, we get the error message in the log. Progress.

Looking at the error message, I see that it is complaining about the index of my array of data. Any time the index goes over 256, the error is thrown (I had to check this by assuring 255 values went into the array first, then 256, then 257. It took time.).

So after discovering the problem, a quick Google Search and a StackOverflow question lead me to a quick solution to my problems. It turns out that Spring (view my other post about Spring and Spring Boothere) sets the default max index of an array to 256 and to override this, you need to add in a short function. Seems easy enough, and it was actually. A few lines of code and another test of the functionality and it just worked.

After celebrating my victory of conquering the error with no output, I realised that this problem was probably the same problem we were having with another system we were creating. This too had a large array of values that we were trying to create.

I confirmed the error message was the same, added in the same function that had fixed my first problem, tested it and found that it too had been fixed.

After feeling like I had accomplished greatness, I checked in my changes and went on my merry way. In the process, I learned that through a bit of trial and error, you can often find solutions to even the strangest of problems. You might even hit two birds with one stone.

Client: ASocial Enterprise

The client is a social enterprise that provides one-on-one coaching for individuals who are looking for employment and education.

Their sessions are infrequent and varied, therefore they require a flexible room hire that allows them to only pay for the time they need. They required a private coaching room, but didn’t want the formality of a boardroom or a business meeting room.

The Space’s Informal MeetingRoomSolution

• We providedthe Loungeat anhourly rate, which gave the client flexibility to book and pay only when the space was needed.
• The room is furnished with sofas and chairs, creating a more informal atmosphere.
• The room hire also included refreshments of tea and coffee with no added cost.
• The client used thefree parkingavailable on site, allowing them to avoid busy city traffic and high parking prices.

There are two basic ways to drive traffic to your website: paid and unpaid. Paid includes social media advertising, paid search advertising and banner display campaigns, while unpaid includes SEO and organic social media.

The distinction between ‘paid’ and ‘unpaid’ is slightly misleading however. For example, SEO is a fine art, and one for which you will often have to pay for if you want it done well. You can always learn to do SEO yourself, but that will take time and resources.

Generally speaking, if you want to increase website traffic rapidly, you’re going to have to pay for it. That’s ok though, so long as you choose the right marketing method for your business you will be able to cover these costs and more with the conversions you make on your website.

For now let’s take a look at the three main ways to increase traffic to your website: social media marketing, SEO and paid search.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is, you guessed it, marketing on social media. There are two ways to go about this: paid and organic.

Organic: Driving traffic with organic social media requires the cultivation of a loyal and engaged audience. The best exponents of organic social media marketing provide value to their audience independent of their product or service. This can be done by the creation of original and stimulating content, or simply by engaging directly with your audience and building a personal rapport with them.

While organic social media marketing is ‘free’, like SEO, to be done well it can cost money. Unlike SEO, there are few proven specialists, and even fewer proven methods of delivering ROI. Generally speaking, if a company were to employ a seasoned social media professional, it could take anywhere from 6-12 months to see tangible results. This is not to say that you should neglect organic social media marketing altogether, but rather that you should not count upon it to drive any significant traffic to your website in the short to medium term. By all means maintain a social media presence, however. Visibility is key online, and you want your customers to be able to find you and contact you wherever they choose to hang out online.

Paid: Paid social media marketing generally consists of advertising on the four main social platforms: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. Paid social media marketing is capable of delivering tangible results very quickly, and can be a great way of driving relevant traffic to your website. Depending on the platform, the target audience and the product, however, this can sometimes be relatively pricey.

Nevertheless, if you do have a little bit of budget to play with then this is definitely an avenue you should look to explore. Choosing which platform is right for you will depend entirely on the nature of your business.

• The visual nature of Instagram means it generally favours well established brands and bricks and mortar businesses.
• Twitter has a broader appeal, and its keyword focussed advertising can be hugely effective with the right targeting.
• LinkedIn is the most expensive of the four platforms, but in return for your outlay you are able to target individuals based on their professional attributes which can be highly valuable in advertising certain products and services.
• By far and away our favourite social advertising platform is Facebook, however. Here you can create highly targeted ads, based upon key demographics such as income and occupation. The nature of Facebook means people are much forthcoming in sharing a broad range of personal information than on any of the other platforms. This is a marketer’s dream, as you can place your ads before highly targeted audiences, based on demographics, interests, behaviours and a wealth of other options.

Search Engine Optimisation

SEO (search engine optimisation) is the art of optimising your website for search engines. The ultimate goal of SEO is to increase the ranking of your website in the SERP (search engine results page).

If you can make sure your website is near the top of the rankings for your relevant keywords, then the traffic will drive itself to your site. The difficulty is getting your website to that point.

SEO is determined by many factors but authority and relevancy are of high importance.

Authority can be measured by the amount of links from authoritative sources to your website, hence the importance of backlinks. Sometimes the amount of shares your content gets on social media can be a sign of authority.

Relevance is measured by how relevant the content on your website is to any particular search query, hence the importance of maintaining keyword focus when creating content.

The problem with SEO, as outlined above, is that it is only ‘organic’ by name. To achieve results you will have to invest in either time or money to build your presence in search.

There are a few tweaks you can make to your website yourself, such as optimising title tags, increasing mobile friendliness and by optimising your images, but SEO is a long term commitment, and generally you will need to allocate budget to drive traffic to your website in this way.

Paid Search

Paid search, otherwise known as SEM (search engine marketing), or, more commonly, PPC (pay-per-click), consists of advertising on and across the major search engine platforms. The biggest appeal of paid search is that it allows you to gain high visibility in search engine results without the need for a naturally high ranking website.

The most popular paid service is Google AdWords, Google’s own advertising service which allows you to advertise not only in the Google search engine results, but across its vast network of partner websites.

So how does it work?

The AdWords system is built around ‘keywords’ – words and phrases which users might use to enter a search query into Google. The key to success with AdWords is effective keyword research. If the right keywords are targeted, if the sweet spot between high search volume and low competition can be met, then you will be able to drive high volumes of relevant traffic to your website, at a price that enables you to post a healthy ROI.

So, for example, if you sell garden furniture, you may want to target keywords such as ‘garden chairs’ or ‘garden bench’. In theory, when an individual enters either one of those search terms into Google, your ads will be triggered, and will appear at the top of the search engine results page above the ‘organic’ results.

Unless you’re already ranking in the top two or three organic results for your keywords then the chances of someone reaching your website through organic search for broad terms like these is very low. The beauty of PPC is that you only pay for your ad when someone clicks it, meaning that in terms of driving traffic to your website AdWords is essentially the advertising equivalent of ‘no win no fee’!

For this reason PPC is an utterly invaluable marketing method, and is by far our favoured means of driving traffic to websites.

Hopefully this article has helped you think more clearly about the options available to you in your search for traffic, and that you will be able to go forward from here to choose the right method for your business and your marketing objectives.

Working with air tightness and ventilation testing experts RJ Acoustics, Tudor Lodge Consultants are very pleased to announce the launch of a bespoke, fully functioning and up to date website (www.rjacoustics.com). RJ Acoustics offer a wide range of building tests that all new builds and developments must undertake before it becomes livable including water calculations, air tightness, ventilation testing, commissioning and more.

Project Specification

To design and build a fully mobile-responsive website to maximise user experience and rankings on Google.

What we Have Done

With their previous site becoming increasingly outdated, we undertook a total overhaul strategy. Working closely with a team of experienced developers, we planned and designed a site that had SEO (search engine optimisation) at its core. By ensuring that all content throughout the site is new as well as being up to date for SEO and online best practices, we have helped RJ Acoustics fly up Google; moving them up 3 pages in the space of just a couple of months.

Content needed to also be in line with current UK practices regarding the services offered by RJ Acoustics and this meant that we had to comply with a number of industry best practices too when writing the content.

We have improved their rankings on Google for keywords such as ‘air leakeage testing’ and ‘air tightness testing’ by producing new content, meta data, user journey, removing crawl errors and increasing the site speed. This has meant that the content and works on site are read as efficiently as possible by Google and other search engines, making sure RJ Acoustics are able to maximise their positions by being rewarded for the cleanest SEO practices.

What we are doing

We are making continuous tweaks and updates to site content and meta data to get it up to the highest standards, as well as building a clean backlink profile. 

Site speed and mobile responsiveness are becoming increasingly important in this day and age of ‘browsing on the go.’ Therefore, we continue to work towards fully optimising RJ Acoustics’ already impressive site speed and mobile features, with a variety of new pages, features and designs on site to come.

Ransomware is a very real threat; every day a business is singled out by the perpetrators of this all too common cyber extortion, costing organisations money, time and the loss of important data.

It’s happening right now and it’s happening within businesses close to you; along-with our partner Datto, we want to work together to ensure it doesn’t happen to you.

Ransomware doesn’t discrimate – it isn’t just the large multi-nationals that are on the minds of cyber criminals, targets are small to medium sized businesses with gaps in their IT security and data that is just ready for the taking.

What you’re up against are the many variations of malware that can infect your computer systems, ransomware encrypts files and data, leaving them inaccessible to the owner or permanently deleting them – they could even be posted on the internet.

Essentially ransomware locks your files and holds your business hostage until you pay the ‘ransom’ – and even then there is no guarantee you will recover your data.

96% of ransomware victims lose access to their data for more than a day, obviously resulting in a serious impact on productivity and profitability.

We partner with Datto, as they are actively doing something to stop ransomware targeting you:

Datto recommend 3 layers of protection:

– Education: make your company aware of the dangers of social engineering scams and phishing emails – if in doubt, don’t click on the link

– Antivirus: can prevent a full-blown infection, however new strains of ransomware are always being created – often at a higher rate than antivirus can protect against

– Total Data Protection: the ultimate failsafe in a layered defense strategy against ransomware.

Breakwater can secure your systems using the advanced technology from Datto:

– Datto SIRUS: protects physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures

– Backupify: the leading cloud-to-cloud backup and recovery solution for applications including Office 365 and Google Apps

– Datto Drive: enables you to easily roll to a backup created before the attack.

Take a look at our Dattosolutions to find out all the info on how they will keep your business protected, or get in touch and we can talk you through how we’ll keep your business and its data safe.

Lean: it really is all about common sense and learning to see waste. Every organisation should benefit from a bit of lean thinking, by focusing on what we’ll call value added activities.

Lean is a term coined by researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) back in the late 80s. They were trying to figure out why Toyota was so much more efficient at producing cars than, for example, Ford or GM. They chose the term ‘lean’ to try and describe what they’d discovered. With ‘lean’ they were describing a process without a lot of unnecessary work.

Unnecessary work is all work that does not add value to the customer. And, as with your body, a lean company is something to strive for. Having said that, not all fat is bad. It is all about a healthy balance. This goes for our bodies, but just as much for our processes and organisations.

Lean, to me, means ‘flow’. According to several dictionaries, flow can be defined as:

“to move in a continuous and smooth way”(Webster’s)

or

“to move in one direction, especially continuously and easily” (Cambridge).

As a word, Lean has become part of the business vocabulary. I use it because many people will have an idea of what I am talking about. However the term ‘Flow’ captures the goal much better.

Why does Lean thinking work?

Any process should be organised in such a way as to enable the movement of parts or information in a continuous and smooth way. There are many tools and methods that help to achieve this, but ultimately that is what I try to do. Asking simple common sense questions is often all we need to do to get a better flow state.

The results will invariably include less stress, less variation in the process, happier people, higher quality and, as a result of all of this, lower costs.

A brilliant book that describes the essence of what I am talking about is called’This is Lean’ by Niklas Modig. If you are interested in more detail about lean and flow, I can also recommend that you read material fromJim Womack.

In summary, lean is all about making things flow by applying common sense and by challenging the status quo. Simple as that.

We thought it might be useful to create this guide to the top 5 qualities you should look for in an SEO or digital marketing partner. We hope it assists.

1. Years of SEO Experience

Anyone can set-up an ‘SEO agency’ overnight and call themselves an ‘SEO expert’. This does not necessarily mean they know what they’re doing. There are hundreds of elements which go into the wider bigger picture of doing SEO and it takes many years of experiencing what works and what does not to truly do a good job.

Every website needs different SEO tactics to succeed. An SEO professional with many years of experience will be able to look at any website and know exactly what needs to be done for it to gain more search engine traffic, while someone new at SEO will try the same things on every site, which will only have a limited effect, if any. As we have mentioned many times before, this is about your competition. Understand this and your tactics will succeed.

2. An Understanding of All Three SEO Levels

Search engine optimisation involves three levels:

Technical (the structure of a site, which can determine how easy or difficult it is for search engines to crawl and index your content)

On-page optimisation (the use of such elements as keywords and HTML tags in ways that help increase search engine traffic to your site)

Off-page optimisation (such as link building).

“You don’t want a one-dimensional SEO,” says Taylor Pratt, vice president of product marketing for Raven Internet Marketing Tools. “You need someone who will approach their strategy from all three angles to maximise success.”

If search engines can’t access all the content on a website, or some content is buried too deeply in the site, then any other efforts made on the URL will be useless in terms of SEO success.. This means that all SEO consultants or companies should understand all technical limitations and issues that search engines may have, and they need to be able to articulate those to the developers of your website so that the issues can be minimised.

3. A Proven Track Record of SEO Success

It’s easy to talk a good game in SEO. There are tons of blog posts and articles that describe various SEO processes one can use. But it’s another thing to have happy clients. Anyone looking to hire an SEO consultant or company should definitely check at least three fairly current references to discuss how the SEO company helped them succeed. More than that, ask for the search positions ranked. In Google you can physically search on date ranges and see when the website ranked and for what, even after the project has finished. Also, if there was a contract and it was terminated early there is often the reason that the customer was ‘informed’ of ‘issues’ by a potential new supplier wanting business, or by reading outdated information concerning techniques. Not all relationships end well. Often this is the client’s ‘fault’ as much as that of the service provider.

4. Marketing Knowledge

Once you get beyond the technical issues of a website, SEO is a lot like traditional marketing. Content needs to be written in a way that outlines the benefit to the user while leading them to a sale. And it all has to be done in a way that also appeals to the people at the other end of a search engine who are looking for what your company has to offer. However, writing is carried out in conjunction with the search ranking competitive space for your URL on your key phrase.

5. A Well-rounded Perspective and Knowledge

“For years, I thought I could ignore subjects outside the hyper-focused SEO arena,” says Rand Fishkin, CEO & co-founder of SEOMoz. “If it didn’t have to do with ranking web pages in search engines, bah humbug! That attitude was foolish and wrong. Today’s SEO needs to understand all of marketing at a deep level, the psychology of the human race, the specific culture to whom they’re marketing, the social media landscape, web analytics, web design and development, viral marketing, content, product, business models and more. When we disconnect SEO from these other critical practices, we make short-term decisions that can ultimately hurt more than they help.”

But on point 5 we have also seen (in recent months) Rand and Google disagree. So even with his knowledge, experience and understanding of the subject, opinion is still a factor in the process of SEO and ultimately digital marketing.

6. An Understanding of the Big Picture

Does theSEO consultantfocus on conversions (converting a visitor to your site into a customer), or are they more concerned with search engine rankings? Ideally, the focus of any digital marketing strategy should be to accomplish a goal (like increasing conversions), not to achieve a certain rank. This cannot always be the case however (see improvement piece below).

7. The Capability to Fit in With Your Company’s Culture

SEO professionals must interact with many areas of your business including IT, marketing, customer service, analytics, and sales. The ability for them to work well with members of these teams is essential. The personality, integrity and communication style of the SEO professional you employ should ideally fit with the organisation and its team or progress is likely to be not as positive.

8. Excellent communication skills.

Speaking of communication style, an SEO professional needs to be able to clearly communicate why a change must be made to your website in terms that everyone understands, not using jargon!

A typical SEO professional cannot do everything themselves. So, they need to be able to communicate why a certain change needs to be made in terms that everyone understands. Getting a point across clearly and concisely is vital. A general business knowledge, years of experience and life skills will add to the mix for you. We’re all learning – this is a ‘tech’ business. So, it is likely that the longer we’ve been learning the more knowledge and understanding we will be able to share.

9. A passion for execution.

SEO professionals love getting results for their clients. It’s what makes us tick. You will see whether you are the right fit for yours by looking into their eyes and gauging their passion. A great SEO consultant and digital marketing professional loves to carry out their work efficiently and methodically. If their spirit is broken by negativity or impatience or doubt it is typical that the project is doomed to failure.

10. Curiosity.

While knowledge is certainly important, curiosity is essential, too. Finding an SEO who can recite the IP addresses for all of Google’s crawlers is great, but one who’s deeply curious and constantly investigating how that crawler works is even better,” Fishkin says. “I’ve often met SEOs whose knowledge was fantastic, but at some point in their career, it ceased to grow. I’d rather have a fresh mind that’s hungry and growing than a grizzled vet whose thirst for new knowledge died in 2006.”

We concur with this. Our job is both analytical and forensic in its processes. It relies on many skill sets to succeed. We are not afraid to talk about experimentation. We have to be flexible in our approach. Now, more than ever before, the work we carry out in one month is not likely to be totally replicated in month 2 and so on. Likewise, we do not bind clients to long term contracts. We can only talk about improvement and planning. But, with this in focus we do succeed in any case, as our benchmark is defined from the onset of the project.

We concur with this. Our job is both analytical and forensic in its processes. It relies on many skill sets to succeed. We are not afraid to talk about experimentation. We have to be flexible in our approach. Now, more than ever before, the work we carry out in one month is not likely to be totally replicated in month 2 and so on. Likewise, we do not bind clients to long term contracts. We can only talk about improvement and planning. But, with this in focus we do succeed in any case, as our benchmark is defined from the onset of the project.

Our latest Health and Safety newsletter has just been published.

In this month’s newsletter we cover;

– Do You Have Trees on Your Property?

– Richard Mills has been carrying out Legionella Workshops for the CIEH

– IOSH Managing Safely; A New Health and Safety Course for RedCat

– Lorry Driver Killed 4 People Hours After Signing Mobile Phone Declaration

– The Clocks Go Back; Time To prepare for Winter Driving

– The Impact of the New Sentencing Guidelines for Courts

– H&S Legislation Highlights

– How Good is Your Occupational Health Knowledge?

To read our latest newsletter click here

Are you looking to get yourself banned from Google? There are a number of thingswhichyou can do to make sure that Google thinks that your website as spam. If you don’t want to get banned, ensure that you don’tdo these things.

1: Create your content automatically

Don’t take the time to create original content. Usesoftware to create your web pages automatically. You’ll save loads of time and you will get a high bounce rate (single page view) because your website visitors likely won’t understand your web pages.

Automatically created content is targeted by Google’s Panda algorithm (mathematical score for ranking your site in the search engine) so this is a good way to get banned.

2: Use key phrase rich doorway pages & employcloaking

This is a (very) old method but it still works very well, especially if you combine it with the aforementioned automated content. Create pages that contain a lot of your key phrases for search engines. Subsequently redirect the real visitors of your website to other pages on your site.

Protip: Redirect your users to pages that are totally unrelated to the content of the doorway pages. Chances are that Google will ban your website even quicker then.

3: Hide text on your web pages or stuff it in!

Also a classic: Instead of using doorway pages, just enter the key phrase rich text on your regular pages. Then hide it so that your website visitors cannot see it. You can do this by using white-text on a white background, with stylesheets (CSS), or with a very small font size. Be creative. A cool way to hide links on your pages is to link dots at the end of a sentence.The other option to get a negative reaction is to add lots of key phrase led text for your anticipated phrases – visible on the page, and expect that the engine will exonerate the lack of landing page link!

The more text you hide on your pages, the more likely it is that Google things that these web pages are spam. The more spam-ridden text on the page, the same conclusion from the engine.

4: Get links in bulk

Getting real links is completely daft and unnecessary. It is much too much work if you want to get banned on Google. Real links will improve your rankings on Google and this is not what we’re trying to do here.

If you want to get banned, you should try to get links in bulk or pay for them: Automatically submit your website to thousands of forums, automatically create forum profile links, buy as many links as you can on as many websites as you can. Make sure that these links always contain the same anchor text.

Google’s latest Penguin algorithm has made it more difficult to get penalised by bad links. Fortunately, you will still get a manual penalty if you have enough of these backlinks.

If you want to get higher rankings on Google, avoid the things above at all costs! Use white-hat website optimisation methods, or ethical link building services to get high rankings. Be methodical and understand averages not actuals. A ‘top, middle, bottom’ approach to quality will be more likely to succeed than one which is all of one weight.

White-hat SEO methods are methods that play by the rules.