Ian Lockwood is a director of Boom Online Marketing and an independent consultant specialising in online marketing, with over a decade of experience in the web industry.
Ian is an SEO God, no kidding he is worth his weight in gold. I have never been so excited & received such practical useful & invaluable info.
Business Link Workshop Delegate
Whether you require training, have a problem with your site or would like to develop an online marketing strategy, Ian can help. Read more »
I’ve just written a new post over at our company blog, Boom Online Marketing, about how the DVLA Registrations website has moved to a sub-domain of direct.gov.uk and is benefitting from its domain authority at the expense of competing companies.
If you haven’t already, I recommend subscribing to the Boom blog/newsletter as it’s kept far more up to date than my own blog here! 
I’m pleased to say that the eBusiness Club will be running its fifth Online Marketing Conference. Some of you will know that I spoke at the last one, and if you visit the conference page here, you can book your place, as well as rather embarrassingly see me in action!
There are a couple of great keynote speakers this year and I will be doing my bit too delivering a “What’s New In Search” session along with website reviews and sitting on the Experts Panel, so I hope you can join the hundreds of other East Midlands businesses and take advantage of this great (free!) opportunity.
You can see some pictures of the previous conference on Flickr here. Here’s one of me in full flow that I quite like:
Just a quick post as a favour to a friend: Andrew Clark of video production company Black Hawk Productions has launched a new website, with the novel idea of actually telling people what they might expect for their money. As well as showcasing Andrew and his team’s great work, there is a page showing what to expect at various levels of budget, which I think is a great idea – prospective customers know what to expect for their cash, whilst Andrew will be saved numerous hours on the phone having the same conversation about costs!
Best of luck to Andrew with the new site – you just need some links now mate! 
I read a good post on Search Engine Watch today about the possible effects of Google’s new URL shortener, http://goo.gl – similar in essence to Bit.ly and all those other URL shorteners people use to post links on Twitter, Facebook etc.
The article suggests that Google has very good reason to promote this service – it offers Google another way of measuring what people “like” on the web, even when they don’t have a website of their own from which to make links. That means that whilst traditionally, links from websites have counted as “votes”, not many web users actually had their own websites from which to link. Being able to track what users of social media sites are linking to adds a significant amount of web users to those empowered to “vote”.
Not only that, but because you’ll be logged in to your Google account, Google may well have some demographic data to associate with the link you’re making. And of course, Google can aggregate all the links being made through Goo.gl and get a picture of “what’s hot”, enabling it to inform its search results better when people are searching for related topics.
Of course, Google has a habit of changing its mind about services (goodbye Google Wave, pages being tracked in Google Reader etc.), but as the functionality is essentially the same as other URL shorteners, it might make sense to start using Goo.gl when making short links to your own pages for Tweets etc., just in case you do get that extra bit of SEO juice…
Google have just issued an email to Google Merchant Centre users (which powers Google Product Search), telling merchants who sell electronics that they need to start including at least two unique product identifiers from a choice of MPN, Brand and EAN.
The email reads as follows:
Starting in the first months of 2011, we are making some changes to how your products in the Electronics category may appear on the UK and German versions of Google Product Search. In order to provide as much information as possible to our users, we need your help in matching your products to our “product pages” where users are able to view useful data such as product specifications or reviews. If you are submitting products in the Electronics category, please start including at least two of the following three unique product identifiers: MPN, Brand, and EAN.
These attributes will not be required for your feed to process correctly, however, to avoid seeing a drop in traffic from Product Search, we urge you to start including these unique identifiers as soon as possible. You can find unique product identifier information on Product Search product pages, under the “technical specifications” section for Electronics items.
For more details, including what specific identifiers you should include for each category of item, please see our Help Center at http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?hlrm=en&answer=160161
Clearly your product rankings are going to suffer if you don’t follow their suggestion, so if you don’t already put these identifiers into your Merchant Centre feed, now is the time to sort it out!
I spoke to a nice chap called Sam at the Applegate Directory today, who very kindly offered to give all my blog readers, Twitter followers and anyone else who cares to ask a 30% discount off their new Mercury Listing.
The Mercury Listing gets you this little lot:
Clearly this is pretty handy for SEO, and you can see how it’s being used by some companies here and here. I have found Applegate to be quite handy for several of my clients, although I’m not guaranteeing it is the right thing for everybody – depends very much if you have the kind of business suited to that directory (primarily business-to-business), although the SEO benefit of lots of keyword-rich deep links to your site from a PageRank 6 domain can’t be denied for any type of website.
The cost? Usually £595 +VAT, but with the 30% discount, £416.50 +VAT. Note that you can’t get this online – you will have to call Sam on 01271 852 000 and quote reference IanLockwoodSR2.
Please feel free to Tweet, email and generally spread this discount code to anyone you think would benefit, it isn’t dependent on knowing me personally!
I’m pleased to announce that along with my good friend Ann Stanley of Anicca Digital Solutions, we are delivering Figaro Digital magazine’s Digital Marketing Academy.
This is a series of training workshops, held at London’s rather swish Hospital Club, based on the Customer Acquisition, Conversion & Retention model. The workshops will provide a holistic view of how to use online marketing techniques to achieve each of the stages in the customer buying cycle, so you can expect to learn about SEO, PPC, Analytics, conversion rate optimisation, social media and email marketing. You can pick and mix from the days on offer at £495 per day, or take all four days at a discounted rate of £1485, giving you one day free!
Click over to the itinerary here to understand more about how the Digital Marketing Academy can help you. Warning: There is a mugshot of me further down that page!
I received some very nasty spam allegedly from HMRC titled “Reminder: Please Resubmit Your Refund Payment” today, as you can see below:
Rather than open the attachment, I saved it to my PC and had a read through the source code, as it’s a web page. The HTML revealed nothing much and references various online.hmrc.gov.uk URLs, until you get further down and spot that if you actually submit the form, it will be sent to this address: http://www.radio-rocket.eu/licznik/ndex.php
The page then goes on to grab various image files (security-related mostly, e.g. credit card logos) from sites including abbyparty.com, rbsworldpay.com and argos.co.uk. I’m sure they’ll all be delighted to know their bandwidth is being used to power phishing spam…
Don’t get caught out by this phishing scam – I’m sure most of you wouldn’t, but just in case you’re tempted by a refund from the taxman, resist!
Just a quick one – you can now get yourself listed on Bing Local Listings (Maps) via this website: www.bingforbusiness.com
In a somewhat odd step, considering they have their own Local Business Centre in the States, Bing has outsourced the provision of local listing data to a company called 118 Information. Clicking the “get started” link on www.bingforbusiness.com takes you to a special page on their site, where you must search for your business by phone number/post code and if it isn’t listed, you can add your details and get a call within the next working day. I strongly suspect this will involve an element of sales, not least as the website professes to provide data for all these:
One other thing I noticed is that for some reason, the submission form is very broken in my browser – no tabbing, use of cursor keys or even delete! Way to go on the accessibility front…
I’m speaking at the Metafocus “Driving Global Trade Through Internet Marketing” forum on 27th May at the Novotel Nottingham, J25 of the M1. To quote the marketing:
This forum has been developed for decision makers in International & Export Companies to help them use the Internet to reach overseas markets, expand their business and drive profit.
The event starts at 8.30am and lasts until midday (slightly earlier actually, to allow time for networking). The cost is £55 inc. VAT and the itinerary is:
9.00 Andrew Schlich, AST Language Services – Successful Communication with your Overseas Customers
9.20 Anja Nelskamp, Metafocus – Why Languange and Culture Matters
9.35 Ian Lockwood, Internet Consultant – The Importance of Ongoing Online Promotion
10.05 Alan Clements, Metafocus – Why You Need a Global Internet Marketing Strategy
10.50 Panel Q&A – Joined by Thomas Schaal (International Trade Advisor for the UKTI)
As you can see, my slot isn’t strictly international-focused, but it is relevant to all online marketing. If you have any interest in marketing outside of the UK, I strongly recommend attending – Metafocus have developed a real reputation for specialist knowledge of international online marketing.
You can book online here.
