One of the most recent ventures webSEOlive undertook on behalf of Mocking Bird Hill was to focus the attention of their website users, actual local population and hotel+restaurant customers on their produce suppliers. These suppliers largely consist of local, small, independent businesses, many offering organic and/or sustainable products, often with the aim of providing support to the local rural economy and ensuring economic & similar ancillary benefits for the host community.

webSEOlive’s initial remit was simply to provide literature for guests at the hotel to read in the comfort of their rooms, but we felt that something more ‘visually impactive’ might be better, and ideally something that could be displayed easily online and in a more communal physical location. On this basis, we decided to go with a poster, incorporating a map of Jamaica and indicating all the suppliers, with a brief product description and giving their geographical distance from Hotel Mockingbird Hill (“food miles”).

To try and maintain an environmental theme we used old paper samples to make the backgrounds for the digital file, one for the map, done in a sort of antique treasure map style, the other the main poster, with virtual push-pins indicating the location of the suppliers; below the map the push-pins were used to “pin” smaller Polaroids of the produce with a little blurb in manuscript-style font. Despite the varied elements the overall design was we feel eye-catching and engaging.

This simple, pictorial device allows customers to quickly ascertain both the diversity and relative locality of the produce available at Hotel Mocking Bird Hill, emphasising the hotel’s worthy efforts to source locally and highlighting the other businesses in the vicinity providing quality products. Importantly, Hotel Mockingbird Hill is one of a very small number in Jamaica, possibly even unique, to source locally on such a scale and as part of a philosophical creed. The majority of other hotels in Jamaica rely instead on products shipped in from the US and all over the place, and do little to support the sustainable infrastructure of Jamaica itself…

Social Media also played a part in determining the poster’s affectivity; we ran it on Mockingbird Hill’s Facebook & Twitter pages; once it was up on Facebook the local suppliers, with access to the internet anyway, became fans, helping create a viral awareness for their own products, our client Mocking Bird Hill, and of course ourselves. This might even lead to some of these other independent producers looking at our services to see what we can offer them in the future… such is the advantage of cross-promotion, at a variety of levels!

The book is a big and beautiful celebration of love for a person, region and flavours from one of our favourite regions in the world, Abruzzo Italy. The recipes are enticing but simple, the stories that weave them together intriguing the reader to dip further & further into the book, until the light has faded and the coffee is cold…  Love Italian food? Then this is one cookbook that you shouldn’t be without!

Pre-order the book today!

Our awareness and interest in the Abruzzo region of Italy meant we were delighted to be asked to apply our own online skills & local knowledge to the online promotion of this excellent book, hopefully bringing it to as wide an international market as it deserves.

In a Fickle World Choose the Best

The point of such forums is wasted on us at webSEOlive; why spend so much money & energy in custom-building a website/online forum when the tools are out there for you to utilise already?!   A network like Facebook can give you a dynamically increasing world of potential readers, with an established & understood interface and constantly growing fan-base, and doesn’t require you to get bogged down in the confusing world of competitive site optimisation.

Think Global to Snowball

Despite the objections of the many who rashly shy away from the supposed invasiveness & faddishness of such social media, webSEOlive do advise investing time and online marketing spend on such networks. Options such as broadcasting via a Facebook business page are a fine place to start, but really you need to learn to harness the many levels such social sites can provide your business, ensuring the experience your brand offers is shared with many rather than just a select few…

Ignoring a Market the Size of the 3rd Largest Country in the World

We do know businesses within the travel industry that still believe Facebook isn’t for them and there is no point creating a business page; there are many too whose foreign agents admit the same thing.  Ignorance kills business, and if you or the people that represent your business don’t evolve you will not compete.

Here’s the Facebook Coverage of 18-year olds + in quite important markets in March 2010.   As Toby Beresford from Nudge said, the total Facebook market is the equivalent of being the 3rd biggest country in the world; the age group that are creating the most accounts = 55+; can you afford to ignore Facebook any longer?

Facebook Demographics March 2010

We have an active interest in eco-friendliness and wholly support & respect sustainable tourism. We have also greatly enjoyed working alongside our ‘Green’ clients so far! For these reasons webSEOlive are now offering a comprehensive selection of tailored components especially for this sector’s needs.

Increasing & Sustaining your Online Presence

With the increasing number of businesses that look to the web as an affordable alternative to more traditional marketing and PR,  so the competition grows within the area to receive your precious marketing budget.  These include specialist portal and directory sites, all  claiming to offer definitive directories of eco-lodges etc.; the choice is bewildering and often they are biased or inadequate.  Many only list those have paid a a fee to appear, or take a commission. Wouldn’t it be better to alternatively appear on Page 1 of Google above these sites and cut out the middleman so to speak utilising the latest free tools such as Twitter etc to help get you there?  After all if a journalist is looking to write a story about your location where would they first look an independent company’s website or a directory.  Getting found doesn’t just attract customers it also attracts press too.

webSEOlive believes that to  attract that constantly blooming eco-conscious market you need to have a strong, identifiable and memorable brand, with the right blend of textual and contextual information, images, an ever growing number of pages and appropriate links to help you turn a visitor into a customer and it is in providing these assets.  webSEOlive uses our accumulated, varied experience to ensure that:

• Your branding is believable; people will not spend their hard earnt pennies online if they don’t believe you even have enough money to invest in a logo, style or brochure.

• Your content is king; inspiring & believable, people should be encouraged to book immediately with confidence from reading the pages on your website.

• Your marketing delivers visitors that become customers as well as attracting press; we know how to promote green businesses on the internet, particularly in regard to ‘findability’ (i.e., Google search ranking) and attracting press.  It does take time and is not instantaneous, but we do what’s required, deliver results.

What we can offer your business:

1. Website design or redesign
   Either building a website from scratch or redesigning & optimising a pre-existing one to improve the site’s ‘findability’
2. Provision of Content Management Systems
   Creation of a control panel or content management system (CMS) and blog sites that allows site owners easy & free access to make updates to text, basic format, images, etc without being charged to insert changes to their own web pages
3. Reservation & Calendar facilities
   Full online booking solutions & calendars for availability; rooms
   and excursions
4. Specific optimisation focussed on location and eco-searches
   Ensuring that the client’s website is on the first page of
   organic searches that use location and improved ranking for
   searches on environmentally-friendly holidays etc and
   holiday accommodation in general
   
5. Content / Copy Writing
   We can either provide guidance & proofing for content writing on the site or we can write content under the site owners’ auspices, again to maintain search engine optimised copy
6. Relevant Links & Keyword Building
   We will research and build the website’s links with appropriate and related websites in a wide variety of sectors to boost the site’s indexing; we also understand and will implement the relevant keywords to your particular business, crucial to being discovered online
7. PR and general profile building
   In online and traditional media
   
8. Brochures, Leaflets and Downloadable documentation
   We can create publicity and information documents in a variety
   of formats, including PDFs, for print quality or screen resolution
   
9. Editing of digital images
   If clients can provide good quality images we can edit, process and integrate them into the website. If clients wish to fly us over to take advantage of our own photographic skills we won’t grumble of course!
10. Social Network campaigns
    We can boost our clients’ profiles via such services as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and so on. This includes webSEOlive composing and sending regular “tweets” if required
    

In these times of multi-platform madness, with new online social & business network mediums popping up all the time, it is often perplexing to know where to start. Failing to integrate and benefit from the various options out there available without it turning out into a costly mistake through ignorance can be fatal. Equally, putting one’s head in the sand and pretending that those sort of things are trivial won’t generate income for your business.

webSEOlive specialises in providing complete web solution packages for SMEs, geared for a variety of levels of requirement from redesigning & building WordPress blogs to fully functional e-commerce sites.   For those lacking copywriting skills we provide ongoing content writing & management, in addition to link building and online PR to optimise your website, and make sure it is found for those essential key phrase searches, helping convert visitors into customers.

We know how to maximise the impact of both your online product descriptions and latest news; we can write and co-ordinate your online press releases, create e-newsletters and blog posts, as well as maintaining your Facebook & Twitter accounts. In short we can provide the oil to lubricate the engine of your business online.

Steal our web copy and we’ll name & shame!

At webSEOlive we take pride in our SEO copy writing skills, either training our clients on how to write for the web or, if the clients prefer, undertaking copy writing ourselves under their auspices, particularly when writing for the Travel sector where we have considerable experience and passion.

Sadly when something works well, such as writing unique & original copy that repeatedly gets listed within Google’s top 3 listings on Page 1, it does draw the attention of our clients’ competitors who are looking to obtain those precious places.

What these ‘rival’ companies should do if they lack the skill set or experience to create such copy themselves is to employ someone who is sufficiently capable and understands their way around content for SEO; unfortunately more often than not many employ a plagiarist, who takes your valuable content, applies a couple of negligible changes and then tries to pass this off as their own original work, even though there is a perfectly large © symbol at the bottom of each page.  It always amazes us how companies are ‘big’ enough to employ content creators but are too stupid not to understand what © actually means.  For those that don’t know, here’s the definition:

“Copyright gives the author of an original work exclusive right for up to 100 years after  the authors death  in relation to that work, including its publication, distribution and adaptation, after which time the work is said to enter the public domain. Copyright applies to any expressible form of an idea or information that is substantive and discrete and fixed in a medium. Some jurisdictions also recognize ‘moral rights’ of the creator of a work, such as the right to be credited for the work. Copyright is described under the umbrella term intellectual property along with patents and trademarks.”

We have two sites for which we provide complete & ongoing web content and marketing solutions: the Jamaican eco resort Hotel Mocking Bird Hill and the Italian travel guide for Abruzzo Life in Abruzzo; it is this latter site which has fallen foul most recently of plagiarism.  Although we name and shame we won’t be posting the content stealers links to help their SEO, so if you want to see them you will have to find them and their links yourselves.

How you Know!

We were alerted to Abruzzopassion’s plagiarised use of our original copy on Lifeinabruzzo.com by multiple Google Alerts. Multiple articles were being published on article & travel feed sites which used virtually the exact same title, as well as the body text of this article.  The only changes were that they had replaced the village names and nature reserves and replaced them with their own. Outside the anger & frustration such content theft invokes, there was at least some scope therein for hilarity due to the presumably unintended absurdity of some of the alterations Abruzzopassion had posted…

Although these people claim to know their region intimately, they had inserted that you would be travelling in the footsteps on a notable Italian lady who hadn’t ever set foot in that part of the country, hiking amongst plants and trees that were unique to a particular area that we had described, even as far as pulling in UK/British references that we had made about the oak trees; they had taken the dimensions we had provided for a whole nature reserve and applied them instead to a small town; the final insult to injury was that they had then inserted at the bottom of the page an exact reference we had made in yet another of our pages to the modern British author Philip Pullman, quite quite staggering!

Steps to Battle the Sploggers & Free Riders

Make sure that you insert a © on your site within footer.  Also on your site have a clear copyright page that states to whom copy & images belong.  If people wish to use your text give them a form and an opportunity to do so, but naturally you can reserve the right to charge for such usage.

If you haven’t set up Google Alerts for your marketing already, we suggest you do so now to help protect your unique copy, it is amazing what it throws up.

Check each of your urls in Copyscape: simply add in the url and it will return the results on copyright infringements, it is really very easy and nifty.

If you use WordPress there are now plugins such as this Digital Fingerprint Theft, which you can insert add to your blog.

Make sure that your RSS feed only displays a teaser and not your full article and that it display the copyright symbol or a clear link for visitors to read.

Contact the Owner

In our scenario we contacted the owner of Abruzzopassion, who initially admitted breach of copyright and said that they would be removed, blaming the paid-for blogging service that they had employed to promote their site, which at the time we accepted and awaited the removal of the purloined text.

Sadly in this case the very same content then appeared as an article that appeared on the same site some 8 weeks later.  They were using SEO cloaking this time with no visible link in their navigation but a link from the homepage that featured different text than that actually linked to (the latter our plagiarised copy again).

Steps to Contacting the Owner

Send the owner of the site an email to politely insist that your plagiarised content is removed.  Make sure that you list the full urls and point out the similarities and/or of course obvious duplication.  Even though you will no doubt be boiling over with anger, politely request that they undertake to remove all page and article feeds.  This is difficult due to the nature of feed duplication on the web, so do allow a fortnight.

The 3-Pronged Approach

If this is not done or this is repeated as in our case it is time to take the 3-pronged approach

Contact the Website’s hosting company – Most hosting companies have strict terms about copyright issues and hosting websites that infringe the most basic aspect of good web behaviour.  To find out who hosts your copied content look at Whois; simply type in the domain name and it will return the results of the hosting company.  Look on the hosting website for a legal link normally in their footer. Most of them in this page will explain what to do in the case of stolen copy.  Some will accept emails, especially if you have email evidence where the plagiarism has already been admitted and you can then request under their terms & conditions they remove the individual page or site completely.

Contact Google Spam. If you have your site listed with Google’s webmaster tools you can make a request from here for them to remove duplicate content from their search page results. See here for instructions how.

Digital Millennium Copyright. Google states categorically that it is their policy to respond to clear notices of alleged copyright infringement under the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Take a look at this page or just follow the instructions below in how to report your infringement

• Identify the specific URLs or other unique identifying information of material that Google has removed or to which Google has disabled access.
• Provide your name, address, telephone number, email address and a statement that you consent to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which your address is located (or Santa Clara County, California if your address is outside of the United States) and that you will accept service of process from the person who provided notification under subsection (c)(1)(C) or an agent of such person.
• Include the following statement: “I swear, under penalty of perjury, that I have a good faith belief that each search result, message or other item of content identified above was removed or disabled as a result of a mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled or that the material identified by the complainant has been removed or disabled at the URL identified and will no longer be shown.”
• Sign the paper.
• Send or fax the written communication to the following address:
• Attn: Google Legal Support, DMCA Counter Notification 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043. USA OR fax to: 001 (650) 963-3255, Attn: Google Legal Support, DMCA Counter Notification

This is the cheapest way to stop sploggers and lazy website owners who want your traffic but aren’t prepared to spend the time or invest monies in writing unique copy to get this.   Yes it is a pain, but the law is fully on your side so if you follow these tips you will always win.   If it is repeated again & again by the same people we do suggest that you in addition contact a lawyer who specialises in digital copyright.

Save Yourself Time

If your website doesn’t have a blog, or RSS feed created for your company news postings, now is the time to get one, otherwise you will spend your life  updating all the other social network sites & platforms manually and 3 times over.

Free Image Listings with your Products in Google Search Results

If you haven’t yet, now is the time to sign-up to Google Merchant – why pay for product listings when Google will display your product and an image if you set up an XML feed to Google Merchant.

Tweets Are Top Google Page Listings

Tweet, twitter and tweet again for your business.  Tweets are being displayed now before regular page results on both Google & Bing; what better way to beat your competitors but obviously make it relevant, useful and educational for potential customers to worthy a click thru.

Facebook Fans

There are still many companies out there without a Facebook Business Page; God only knows WHY? Letting people “fan” your business pages via your website may just be the thing that makes a sale, encouraging ratings as well as the ability to receiving regular updates from your company.

Copy is King

When did you check the language of your website?  Does it really contain terms that people will search for; are your meta descriptions compelling enough to encourage anyone wanting to click thru and then stay on your site to result in a conversion and future business or sale?  Copy is and will always remain King; if yours is tired, too salesy or even in ‘your voice’ rather than your visitors and potential customers, this year is the time to invest in a re-write.

Images tell a Thousand Words

There is no excuse for poor imagery on your site, if people don’t believe you are prepared to invest in a small amount of money to promote your business why would they want either to buy your products or your services.  There are plenty of great, inexpensive stock libraries out there that can cost no more than a $1 a piece and for those that need product shots, in the height of a recession and with the advent of digital photography and unemployed photographers this could be the year to recapture the perfect shots for the new decade.

webSEOlive has had a long-running association with the rare & secondhand book-trade. Eight years ago Samantha Dunham used to work for Stocklight as their Web Marketing Manager, for the rare book website of Bernard J. Shapero Rare Books and Bloomsbury Auctions; by the sheerest bloody fluke, webSEOlive’s Roddy Newlands also works for Bloomsbury Auctions, London’s leading auction house in works on paper (such as books), where he has been, staggeringly, since 1995 – 13 years of getting to know & understanding the special needs of bookdealers…

Understanding the Needs of a Fine & Ancient Trade

With such a distinguished pedigree, webSEOlive feels it has a certain “feel” for the needs of this fine & ancient trade, and an awareness of what tools it has at its disposal to cope in this world of blogging, tweeting, digging and stumbling. Despite the first few pallid shoots of economic recovery poking through, frugality still rules and many small businesses are turning more & more to the internet as their primary means of marketing.

An Online Presence Cutting Down on Commission Fees

Online presence has become increasingly important in a competitive market, and while sites such as ABE and eBay provide a useful facility for reaching & selling, they often do so with a hefty commission.  This is where a good, optimised website is crucial, particularly for booksellers with an area of specialisation, or looking to sell at the high end of the market; the ability to be placed on Page 1 of Google above ABE results allows you to sell and foster relationships without paying commission.

For this reason we are proud to announce not just our first book dealer client in McLaren Books, but that we are now looking to offer a variety of customisable solutions tailored for bookdealers, which can be completely tailored according to your short- & long-term business needs. We can not only redesign and build your website from scratch but can work on the optimisation/restructuring of a pre-existing website to dramatically improve page-ranking.

We can also help set up feeds to automatically transfer your stock details onto the main bookselling portals such as ABE and Ilab-Lila. For those interested in the business potential of social networking, and bored of Stephen Fry’s twitterings, we can also provide Twitter profiles for your business so you can Tweet yourself, as well as creating/optimising your Facebook page.

Website Build + Book Catalogue Database & EPOS in 1

Here’s an example of the array of features that we can offer book dealers seeking to optimise their presence online without any annual license fees being incurred:

• Website redesign
• Ecommerce Content & Customer Management System (so that you no longer have to pay for your website to be updated and have just 1 database that runs your book cataloguing database, online and offline store pos)
• The facility to add or edit stock items offline
• Zoom-in function for online stock images
• Online/Electronic Point-of-Sale to allow 3rd party payment by all card types:  for example – Secure Trading, PayPal, Google Checkout, etc.
• “Special Offers” options
• Gift Certificates
• The facility to create PDF catalogues with covers for online or print production
• The ability to display Flip Book Searchable Catalogues
• An integrated blog allowing you to create posts about book fairs, particular books, etc  which are placed straight into Google and allows your “subscribers” to receive automatic feeds/updates without you having to do anything.
• An XML feed to automatically update stock items onto Google’s Merchant index, preferably with images
• Multiple feeds that export stock entries into ABE, eBay, Amazon and similar sites
• An easy Stock & Customer List Import/Export in MS Excel (or similar) format

Accounting

• Orders tracking modules
• Margin & Inventory reports
• Sage & QuickBooks integration
• “Best buyer” lists, end-of-year reports, &c.
• Print design for label and stock detail printing, invoices, settlement statement,

Search Engine Optimisation

• SEO copywriting training
• Backlinking SEO campaign programmes
• Twitter & Facebook account creation allowing people to come to your business from these social networking sites (and other if wished) with full auto-publishing features to these sites from your blog to keep these social network sites updated without duplicating your workload

Newsletter Distribution

• E-Newsletter creation utilising blogs to auto create & send the newsletter or the design & template build

Christmas Opening Hours

We will be open for business almost as usual, with a few days out for the usual Bank Holidays and a couple of additional extra days that we are taking.  Please note we will be working in Abruzzo throughout this period not our London office so we advise contacting us by email or Skype.

For technical support, Sunil will be contactable each day Monday to Friday less Christmas & New Year’s Day if there should be any issues, please contact him on sunil[at]webSEOlive.com.

Office Hours
Monday 21st  & Tuesday 22nd December – CLOSED
Wednesday 23rd  December – 2-4 pm
Thursday 24th December  – 9-12 pm
Friday 25th & Monday 28th December  – CLOSED
Tuesday 29th – Thursday 31st December 9-12 pm
Friday 1st, Monday 4th & Tuesday 5th  January 2010 – CLOSED

You can read about  this environmental disaster here, but first click thru and view the Twitter theme in all its glory.

Don’t forget to follow their progress on Twitter it’s a really worthy cause especially in the lead up to the Copenhagen Summit.