Cracking Media

The importance of Link Building

One of the most important SEO tools on the Internet today is Link Building. It is an extremely effective method of getting your site good exposure across the web, by letting people know what your website has to offer. The thing is, to take full advantage of this Internet resource, you have to know what it’s all about and how to do it right to get maximum benefit.

Why is link building so important?
The easy answer is an increase in traffic. The links that you create are doors that lead others to your website and the services you have to offer. The information on your site is your call to action so it’s very important that the links you forge are with sites of similar content, this helps you to target traffic that may be looking for services like yours.

This works on a very simple premise, if you sell dog whistles and you build links with websites in the cake baking sector, it’s unlikely that much of the traffic that comes through will have much interest in what you do.

Improving your search rankings
Links and traffic are taken into account by search engines and the relevance of the incoming links help to boost your rankings. If the visitors coming into your site are being directed to you from sites with related content, then this builds your reputation as a trusted resource on your subject.

Which links are best?
There are two types of links, two way links (also known as reciprocal links) and one way links. Two way links are traditional and are based upon you linking with a site and agreeing to link to each other. This is still valid and of some value, but the better situation is to have one way links coming in to your site with no return link. What this does is show the search engines that others agree with the content you are publishing on your site, once again helping to boost your reputation as an expert in your field and more relevant than your competitors.

Which pages should incoming links go to?
The old fashioned method of link building is to send all the traffic to your homepage. The problem with this is that the content on your homepage won’t be relevant to all your incoming links and leaves visitors with the task of finding the information they came for.
They won’t!
They’ll just move on!
With the use of social media sites, link building services and a web blog or constantly updated content on your site, you can build incoming links that land directly on the page the visitors want to absorb. Always link to the page that has the most relevance to the site you are linking from, this is rarely your homepage!

Things to remember for a successful linking campaign are:

• Be sure that your content is relevant and easy to understand

By doing this you can be sure that your readers will appreciate and approve of  your offerings, employ the services of a copywriter to get the balance between information and promotion just right.

• Check your content for spelling and grammatical errors

Always proof read your content, this small but often overlooked task helps to remove any signs of non-professionalism and helps to build confidence.

• You should always have a ‘Privacy Policy’ and ‘About Us’ on your website

Remember these are two of the few tools you have to introduce yourself and your business on a more personal level. Make them easy to find so if visitors want to learn more, they can!

5 top tips to running successful email campaigns!

Email campaigns are very similar to direct mailing campaigns via snail mail, with the same principals applying to both. The better the quality of the message, the creative design and the higher the quality of the mailing list the higher the conversion rates are likely to be.

You may have all these elements correct and you send out to your list, sit back and wait for the flood of business. There are numerous other factors involved in running a successful email campaign starting with targeting the right recipients, measuring critical data such as open rates, click through rates and conversions.

Here are 5 top tips for running your own in-house email campaigns:

1. Your emails should be thought of as a conversation, when writing your copy imagine that you are delivering it in person. Try and remove the remote online element from your message.
2. Promotional material that works in a brochure doesn’t necessarily work online! Email is quite a personal method of communication, so your message may be more hard hitting but at the same time could come across to the reader as being too pushy. Try to include information that will be useful to your prospects rather than sticking to the hard sell.
3. Give the “from” and “subject” fields of your message as much thought as the content. Once your email arrives these are parts of your message that will stand out and asked to be opened. Use a pertinent email address not just a name and use the subject line as your headline.
4. “Call to Action” Think about the objectives of your message and the reaction you want to provoke in the recipient i.e. do you want them to pick up the phone, visit a specific web page or request a brochure. Don’t confuse the reader by offering too many actions.
5. Consistency is everything in a marketing campaign of any type. You give the marketing department the task of writing your email campaign, and then use the same easy to understand language on subsequent contact, ordering or information pages. No matter how successful your marketing is, if the ordering process is over complicated or at all confusing, there’s a good chance that potential orders will be lost at the final hurdle.

Here at Cracking Media the Grass Valley Canopus ACEDVio has been a firm favourite for analogue to digital conversion, and has worked faultlessly as a firewire card for longer than we care to remember (as too with our ADVC-300).

So imagine the head scratching when we upgraded one of our video editing suites to Windows 7 64bit, only to find that the ACEDVio no longer seemed to function. All was clear in device manager and all the hardware we plugged in to it installed in the usual way, but no capture was available in Edius or any other software.

Having tried many things to kick it into life we searched around the internet for a possible driver patch and found a fix on the Grass Valley site. Apparently the ACEDVio capture card isn’t compatible with the native firewire drivers in Windows 7 64bit. The fix is as simple as reverting to the legacy firewire drivers that are available in the update driver wizard.

The fix:

Go into device manager and twirl down the ” ieee1394 bus host controller ” section, then right click on the ” 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller ” and choose Update Driver Software, then when the wizard comes up choose to manually install the driver and click on ” 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controler (legacy) ”

We hope this helps if you where thinking it’s time to buy a new capture card or that your ACEDVio has given up the ghost. Though the ACEDVio may be thought of as a bit outdated, there’s still plenty of work for it to do in the world of Cracking Media. The reliability of all our Grass Valley Canopus equipment means we’re not looking to swap just yet.

The Cracking Media video team

Social media sites, such as Twitter, facebook, etc, have changed the web into a wonderful place where we can meet new people, stay in touch with friends and generally be social with the whole world.

Is there more to Social Media? Read the rest of this entry »

Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO)

is a complex balance of all the aspects within your website. Think about the different elements that come together to make your website, including the text content, images and titles through to layout, navigation and even the code that gives every page its structure.  

Read the rest of this entry »

So what’s a domain name?

They’re for web professional only!

Or are they?

In this post we put the spotlight on Domain Names. Simply put, websites have what’s called a domain name. Our domain name is www.crackingmedia.com and this appears in the address bar of your browser when you come to the homepage of our site.

Read the rest of this entry »

So you have a great looking web site – well, maybe you’re not quite there yet – but you are ready to rock the Internet with your brilliant products or services. All that you need to do now is make sure your site is ranked number 1 on Google.

Right?

Wrong!

Read the rest of this entry »

This weekend saw the return of the More Bus Bournemouth Air Festival 2009 which was bigger and better than ever, a full four days of entertainment both on the ground and in the skies.

Read the rest of this entry »