The concept involved printing the individual letters of the words ‘Merry Christmas and Happy New Year’ on separate pieces of A4 card. The 29 cards were then divided between the team who took snapshots of them at random locations including, a busy street, in the office, beside a pet, at famous landmarks and various other places.

As well as a letter, the cards also contained a handy tip for our clients on ways they could improve their website.

The 29 cards were then pooled together to create an animated Christmas card.

You can view the card here at www.adeogroup.co.uk/christmas

http://www.adeogroup.co.uk/christmas

http://www.tullibardine.com/

This development looks spectacular and looking forward to it being completed.

Adeo are really happy to be part of such a big project and having the opportunity to develop the website on our CMS platform.

check out the site here http://www.broomielawquayglasgow.com/

and the BBC article here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-business-15559204

In the first year trading the site has almost made the 2 million turnover mark. We have been constantly developing this platform with features both from an admin perspective and front end user experience.

Read the story published here

http://menmedia.co.uk/manchestereveningnews/news/business/enterprise/s/1457170_a-healthy-first-year-for-konrad-

We wish Konrad all the success in the future and are excited to be working on this project in the years to come.

http://www.bing.com/businessportal, also a good idea is to register for bing web master tools and submit your site to that.

Social Media Marketing being a tool for SEO is something that is greatly talked about in the industry at the moment, with all types of opinions. Personally here at Adeo we think it is an important part of online marketing and implement it to all our new sites. From experience we have found blogging to be highly effective especially when talking about a “hot” topic this can do wonders for ranking and boosting traffic to your site. Regular blogging we feel is important because not only can it drive extra traffic to your site but keeps your content fresh.

Facebook and twitter is something that everyone is talking about in the industry and people are sceptical about if this really works. Personally we believe with the right fan base it can be a great tool. Facebook advertising can also be a powerful tool, the great thing about this compared to PPC for example is you can set up a very targeted marketing campaign which maximises your campaign effectiveness. However it is important to research your target market as like PPC this can quite easily lose money for you.

An up and coming avenue we have tried and tested and found to be very effective is You Tube. We are advising more and more clients to set up a you tube account and implement videos onto their site. This is also great for attracting new traffic to your site, if you have the right keywords in your video name these are picked up on a google search.

Overall all aspects of Social Media do contribute to SEO and is something that all businesses should be a part of. By joining this community you can learn exactly what people expect from you and your business. You get the interaction with the public who can comment on your business. Some people are scared about receiving bad reviews on the likes of facebook but it’s all about how you deal with these issues and the perfect opportunity to exceed your customers expectations with quick responses and helpful feedback.

It’s a pretty big decision to move on to a new platform and generally means the company has outgrown their current platform. For start-up businesses you tend to opt for a cheaper platform and then as the site grows you eventually have to move on to something that’s more suitable.

Hopefully the next few tips will help and aid your migration process.

1. Domain Name Problems

One of the main problems I come up against is transferring the domain or pointing the domain to a new server. In many cases the client doesn’t control the domain themselves and they generally have to involve other people to make this happen. So firstly you need to make sure you have control of the domain or if you don’t have then start planning to have this brought under your control.

A useful tool for this is http://whois.domaintools.com/

You can search your domain, find out what registrar hosts your domain and who owns the domain.

2. SSL Certificates

If your current site uses an SSL certificate then you will have to have this moved to the new server. Generally most SSL vendors will have instructions how to carry this out and your web developer should have a pretty good idea.

You can check if your site uses an SSL certificate by going to https://domainname

In the address bar on IE for example it has a padlock; click the padlock to find out if there is a certificate in your domains name, if not then this may be a shared certificate if the web server has any at all.

3. Organic Search Listings

So probably one of the biggest concerns is what about my organic listings, generally most existing successful sites will have good organic listings. I would say this is one of the most important things to consider. Generally the new site that’s being created will have different url’s for products, categories etc if you can have the same then that’s great, but generally that doesn’t happen so time must be spent mapping the old url’s to the new ones which improves the chances of your site losing any ranking at all. The handy 301 redirect will sort this out for you and let Google etc know where the new url’s are.

below shows how this may be laid out

redirect 301 www.domain.com/oldurl.html    -  -   www.domain.com/newurl.html

This is handled different ways between apache servers and windows servers but if you get an excel sheet or something similar and have one column for old url’s and one for new then your new web developer should be able sort this.

4. Moving Data

Data is hugely important and you have to go out your way to get as much data transferred over to the new platform as possible, not only will this save a huge amount of time, but will also maintain order history etc which is invaluable information.

The main things you need to consider here is how easy is it to access the database on your existing site and then get an export of this in a suitable format to be imported in to your new system. Generally if you can export in a CSV format then your new developers should be able to create an import script and get this up and running on the new site.

If there is information that’s not required for the new platform then this could speed up the process of the build and also the costs may be kept down.

5. Email

Email is highly important so any loss on this service could be hugely detrimental. The fact of the matter is that moving your website shouldn’t really interfere with email unless email is hosted by the existing web company. If you are moving to a new web platform you have probably reached a size that pop3 email isn’t suitable and you should possibly be looking to a hosted exchange service, in house exchange server or what we recommend if you don’t require a huge amount of email functionality then Google apps is a great way to set up your email and very portable with a lot of good features.

If your web company hosts your email, it may be a good time to consider doing a move to another type of email hosting service and any good web company should have suggestions on this.

6. Activating the New Site

When you decide to go live on your new site, you need to allow some time. Even up to 48hrs in some cases, but over the years I have noticed that this has come down and sometimes the action can take effect pretty much immediately, but there is no guarantees of this so make sure you allow for this. Also it’s a good idea to put up a maintenance page on the old site so you don’t get orders on the old site from users who’s DNS hasn’t updated. We have also found launching a site on a Friday as a bad idea as generally the support team on at the weekend are reduced and you may find some minor issues after the new site going live.

7. Full Testing

I can’t stress how important this is, you have to try come up with every imaginable combination of ordering, returning, setting up a new account and testing new features. Usually a major fault may lie in cross browser testing, where it works fine in IE, but not in Firefox, so make sure all tests are completed before launching. Generally you won’t find everything but make sure you iron out all the major bugs.

8. New Features

Migrating to a new platform is a great time to implement some new features, its important to take note of your competitors and what they may have and listening to the needs of your customers who may have identified something that could make the site run smoother. However make sure these are planned out properly and that the developers understand exactly what’s required.

9. Don’t delete the old site

Its worth while keeping the old site running on the old server for a few weeks just in case there is data missing or you need to refer back to something. If you require longer don’t be worried about keeping it on longer until you are completely happy the new site is running correctly.

Hopefully some of these tips should help with a smooth transition to your new platform.

The PDF is only 5 pages, quick to the point and covers some very useful tips to consider when looking at your online presence.

ATG have a large client list and some large brands, however looking at their platform there are a number of improvements that could be carried out to the architecture to make it more SEO friendly. I suppose for many of their sites the search engine friendliness of their cart doesn’t matter so much as they are big brands that don’t require much SEO as the brand really drives the traffic.

The development that went in to Adeo’s RedBack ecommerce software was extensive as we wanted to make this one of the most indexable platforms around the globe and the feedback is good from top UK SEO Companies.

SME-Guide-to ecommerce

Well that was up until now…. With Google’s ever changing adaptations to make our searches more accurate and quicker to find exactly what we are looking for and find a site that we like and are confident to browse on, this new supplement that allows you to preview pages before clicking is a welcome addition in my opinion.

It used to be your sites listing position, title and page description that pulled the users to make that all important click to your website, but it is becoming ever more apparent that well designed pages will have a huge impact in conversion of click through in browsers Google search.

Even more interesting is the fact that when lower level pages within your site are displayed in search results and they have a preview of the page this could really convert more click through as the pages will have a higher relevance on the search term.

What needs to be measured more is how often these site previews are updated, can we force an update or is it when the page is next crawled. Ill keep you all posted on further findings.