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One of the frustrating things about having an easy to update website is that you have to update it! We all have frantic work schedules and although often you have all the tools at your disposal many sites fail to do even the most elementary of updates.

Affiliate Marketing is “an Internet-based marketing practice in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought about by the affiliate's marketing efforts.”

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)  "The process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" or un-paid search results.

Once upon a time creative directors would decide on a strategy that would default to an elaborate and expensive TV campaign at its core. But with the emphatic rise of social networking there is now a fundamental shift in the way companies are interacting with their customers.

This shift is driven by the fact that the traditional approach no longer cuts it with today’s technologically savvy consumers and that new age media sites such as You Tube, Facebook and Twitter allow consumers to easily interact with brands. For an advertiser this opens up a whole array of new creative possibilities including the ability to tap into an endless supply of user generated content.

If you're not used to the idea using your web design agency to produce your print collateral then the title of this blog might seem a little out of place!

Firstly, there's nothing wrong with having two agencies - a traditional print advertising agency and a web agency, for example. If they are used to working together in close collaboration then it can certainly result in some great outcomes for the client. However, for many businesses the reality of this means managing multiple agencies and this is often something they'd rather do without, especially given the additional expense! The harsh reality of choice then has to be made between hiring a print-based advertising / design agency to do your website, or a web design agency to do your print work.

What is Black Hat SEO?

To start, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hat"defines Black Hat SEO as "attempt[ing] to redirect search results to particular target pages in a fashion that is against the search engines' terms of service".

The whole point of a search engine is to allow people to find the websites and pages of information they're interested in the huge and constantly growing world wide web.

To that end search engines, certainly the big three, have terms of service and more importantly algorithms to ensure only relevant results are returned for any given search. Black Hat SEO practitioners try to game the system and effectively "con" the search engine into including their site when users search for a particular term or phrase when ordinarily it would not be deemed relevant by the search engine.

What is Black Hat SEO?

To start, Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hat"defines Black Hat SEO as "attempt[ing] to redirect search results to particular target pages in a fashion that is against the search engines' terms of service".

The whole point of a search engine is to allow people to find the websites and pages of information they're interested in the huge and constantly growing world wide web.

To that end search engines, certainly the big three, have terms of service and more importantly algorithms to ensure only relevant results are returned for any given search. Black Hat SEO practitioners try to game the system and effectively "con" the search engine into including their site when users search for a particular term or phrase when ordinarily it would not be deemed relevant by the search engine.

Is Black Hat SEO right for your business?

Some Black Hat SEO providers defend the practice as being perfectly legitimate but questions of morality aside what is probably on your mind is whether this is something your business ought to take advantage of. These days a website's traffic, largely irrespective of how it was generated, translates into some commercial benefit from increased sales or enquiries to advertising revenue. So it's there is nothing wrong with employing whatever lawful techniques to boost your website's traffic.

Now, let's look at this from the search engine's point of view. Their entire reason for existence (and the fabulous wealth they've built as companies) is to sort through the web and return relevant search results to the user. Beyond that, their revenue in its tens of billions of dollars, depends on there being exactly only one avenue for you to gaurantee your website is displayed prominently against a key word or phrase of your choice, namely paid search results (also called pay per click advertising or PPC).

What's the catch?

Simple! It is not in the search engine's best interest for any other way to exist whereby business can gaurantee placement of their website without paying them. As a result they spend a lot of effort and money to tweak the algorithms which determines what's relevant and what's not to ensure Black Hat tricks don't work, or at least not for long.

This means that if employ Black Hat SEO tricks you need to keep changing them, to try and outsmart the hundreds and thousands of engineers the big search engines employ to thwart your efforts. This might seem exhausting to you, the business owner, but to your Black Hat SEO provider it sounds like GOLD, a never ending river of GOLD!

So what's my best bet?

Using Black Hat SEO tricks to optimise your site for the robots search engines use to read and analyse your site tend to be very hard to use by human beings on top of being like running on a treadmill. On the other hand, having a sensible optimisation strategy centred around relevant frequently updated content and attaching meaningful labels to pages, images, links and so on, will not only boost your website's search engine rankings but will also make it genuinely useful for the human beings who after finding your website will check it out and try to interact with your business.

What do I need?

You can certainly seek help from an SEO professional from the many around who are focused on making your website better and of course you need your website to be able to handle all the changes required. If your current website can't do the job, find a new one that does!

One very obvious but important thing to consider when developing a website is your target market, the primary segmentation of this is broken into two areas, Business to Consumer (B2C) and Business to Business (B2B). Although both these segments share many of the same core values such as ease of use, feature set and intuitive navigation, B2B developments need to focus more on creating a professional corporate image and catering for the users goals.

In this blog we will look at ways that you can utilise new technologies and customised design to communicate and trade with other businesses online, areas that we will be focusing on include;

1. B2B design
2. Functionality and user goals
3. Core messages and user types
4. Processes and efficiencies

Put another way the question is whether online marketing on its own is a sufficient substitute for offline marketing from print to radio and TV commercials. In our opinion the answer is a resounding ‘No’. It may be a surprising answer for an online provider but taking the wider perspective beyond our own role we can honestly say that online is most effective only when part of a more holistic strategy incorporating elements of offline marketing and advertising.

So the question is not so much ‘which is important?’ or ‘can one substitute for the other?’ but more to do with how best use each medium and exploit its strength. To get more tangible let’s consider a few examples.

One of the most important aspects to a successful web presence in being found,  you can increase your visibility through a number of easy free steps that will help users find your site and engage with you business. Make sure that you follow the following 4 steps to give your site every chance of being a success.

1. Submit your site to the major search engines

2. List on Google maps

3. List on all directories

4. Update your sites SEO entries

There are some very basic steps you can take to ensure that your site is indexed by the major search engines and discovered online. Before you pay someone to improve your search engine 'rank' make sure that you have completed the above and watch your website's online visibility start to increase.

A successful corporate identity will be the backbone of your website design and needs to appeal to your target market, represent your company as a professional organisation, differentiate you from your competition while looking good not only on your website but in all forms of media.

Obviously Corporate Identity is something that large corporates spend millions on, and it makes sense. Your logo is one of the most important touch-points of your brand and therefore deserves a lot of attention. However not everyone has millions to spend so how can you save on the cost of developing your new business corporate identity and be assured a good result at the same time? Well, as with most things, you get a better deal if you are able to bundle things together as a package... And that's where you're website design agency may be able to help you out.