This sounded very much like a challenge. And as someone who hosts hundreds of online retailers, some huge ones too, I knew I couldn’t lose.

I bet them £1 I could prove them wrong.

Sitting with my web designers and marketing team, we immediately found ways of improving their system. Their e-commerce shop was clunky although the photography was stunning, the site could never live up to the brand, because the site was slow and the user experience was poor.

We got stuck in as a project and actually built Henleys a new website and content management system to help run it. I know this is some way from our core business, however we were helping out friends and after all, I had a pound at stake.

With in a few months of UKFast getting involved, the site was bringing in significantly more money, and in December that year, they did more than £1,000,000 on the site. We’d actually done nothing more than make the user experience the most important focus point. By speeding up the site and putting the ecommerce shop on seriously fast servers on the UKFast lightening speed network and the results to date, speak for themselves. We didn’t do any “SEO” or optimisation, we didn’t try and stuff the site full of keywords, we didn’t try and cheat the search engines, we built something that users would just love, and they did!

So what went wrong?

Well this is a lesson for us all. Luckily the site is still going and although the brand is taking a battering at the moment, the site is still in action, though sadly it is not performing like it used to.

As a marketeer, when you change something, you monitor it. If it’s good you carry on, if it’s bad you stop and revert to previous stage.

Henleys recruited some in-house SEO Experts. The revenue the site generated warranted more investment in this area and quite rightly, this is what they did.

However, in my opinion, they changed too much in one go to measure what it was that stifled the traffic.

Along with moving to a new web designer, they moved their infrastructure to their designers too which resulted in a massive slow down in site performance. This was not picked up by the team as when they viewed their site, it was super fast as all the images were cached on their machine. To a normal visitor arriving for the first time, they did not have this luxury, to them, the site ran incredibly slowly.

They also changed their domain name from HenleysClothing.co.uk to Henleys.co.uk

This is a fair enough decision in the board room, however, henleysclothing.co.uk was now a massive asset and well used and loved by hundreds of thousands of consumers. It was also very popular with Google who attributes “track record” historical performance information to every domain. A new domain, is literally starting again.

With a number of other UK businesses with the name Henleys in the title, Henleys Clothing descibed the business perfectly.

This coupled with umpteen other changes to their strategy and layout, image sizes, all made it impossible for even the best marketeers to monitor what works and what doesn’t.

The result, they lost momentum and they never recovered.

Sadly, they were already doing everything right and if they’d just left it, it would have continued to flourish at the rate it was.

We have all been there. When something starts to go well, we want more. Its not until you lose what you had, that you concede where we were, was actually where we wanted to be. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and this is why as a business owner or manager or if you are involved with an online business, there is so much information available to help you track your progress. The important thing is, no matter how excited you are for growth to keep the board happy, make small steps and measure. I call this Stop, Start, Rewind. Only when you get really good can you do the fast forward, however use this mode with caution, and if you really cant resist, make sure you have the right people on your team who will tell you the truth at every stage. More importantly, never put middle managers in between you and your key suppliers.

I had real problems reaching Ben and Simon once the site was established. When I was told news of the domain change I did everything in my power to get them information that I had on hundreds of other companies who had done similar things. I was always batted back to the same person who was pioneering all the change.

If you have people helping manage suppliers, make sure you check in regularly to ensure your team are not holding back information to protect themselves. No one likes being responsible for failure, so its imperative that you keep a close eye on the things that really matter in your business.

On a positive side, Henley’s still has a very strong brand, great clothes and if they can get the site back up to speed (quite literally) in my opinion this is fixable. If Simon and Ben are remaining at the helm, I’d imagine they will bounce back very quickly and learn from these very difficult lessons we have all had to face at some time or other. They are tremendous entrepreneurs, it is important not to underestimate what they have achieved building a huge brand in a very short amount of time.

We have an amazing statistic that the vast majority of people who leave our network, return at some point in the future. We had one this week, Gypsy Media. We had hosted them from early 2001-ish for 5 or 6 years. They left for a more competitive solution. They found that that didn’t work. They tried a more expensive solution with a competitor of ours, and after bouncing around a few suppliers, they returned. It is the most rewarding feeling, helping people achieve their goals. At the same time, it is a thankless task. Whilst it goes well, everyone assumes its the SEO specialists and the marketing teams, when it goes wrong, it’s the hosting.

Still I love it and its an amazing era. Who knows where it is going to take us, all I know I am going to keep going, small steps at a time, and measuring as I go.

Yes people do seem slightly more cautious. But this is partly to do with the fact we were told we were heading for recession. I remember backing out of a property deal after the Nothern Rock crisis. Thank goodness Gail and I plucked up the courage and pursued the deal, it was Castell Cidwm, the UKFast training property which is now an integral part of our successful recruitment and training strategy.

The reason for my comments are not flippant, I know a great many people have been through difficult times, my point is this. Is this a recession, or is it merely a change in the way people do business? What do I mean by this? Well, it is safe to say that people have changed the way they buy things.

When you purchase something there are 2 decisions that you make.

1/ do I want/need this product or service?

2/ where shall I buy it from

In the old days! People went to shops and bought there and then.

Then came the internet. Now people looked online, researched and then once they’d narrowed down what they wanted, they headed to the shops and bought it there.

But, then came the new era. An era of confidence where people simply go online to do research and then simply buy it without hesitation.

Well this is a massive shift. It surely makes sense that if you as a business have not embraced this you are going to be in a huge amount of trouble.

I believe the cultural shift in how we buy is SO extreme it is literally wiping businesses out who do not have a credible online presence. Look at Woolworths, they felt that the internet would not work for their business. Yet Argos who embraced it is now one of the biggest online retailers in the world.

I was at a round table this week discussing the economy and budget. I heard numerous businesses explain that they had zero growth. The same businessmen stated clearly when I asked them do they use the Internet to attract new business, “people  in our industry do not use the internet to research our product!” The irony is I have helped a few businesses in the exact same sector generate millions of pounds worth of new business, all via the internet! But how do you educate people who simply do not believe it is possible. These sort of limiting beliefs are lethal and often are the main reasons why businesses simply stop evolving.

If only I got a pound for every time I heard business people say “my customers wouldn’t use the Internet!”

Over the years, I have won a few £1 bets to people I have met at Sale Sharks who said, exactly that.

Caunce O’hara, now giants in the Insurance industry were about to spend a fortune on a website. I asked them to consider a different option. For less money I helped design and build a new system that not only worked out an accurate price for the insurance premium, it took the money and attracted new business. I won my pound.

It’s not a business model I’d advise people to follow, I am lucky enough to be able to do this as a hobby as I have a huge R&D team, I also have done this enough times to know, I’d succeed.

I have done the same in a variety of industries. Debt management, clothing & retail, one business in particular (again who said it cant be done) is now invoicing more than £1,000,000 per month from online sales!

I can guarantee these people dont think we’ve just been in a recession.

The problem is, “you don’t know what you are missing until it is too late.” It’s people’s own shortsightedness that is simply holding their businesses back, or in some cases damaging their business.

I have 15 year old kids who are customers and a great many small businesses who are doing extraordinarily well. It’s never the brands who are riding the crest of the wave, they simply think they are. A lot of the high traffic sites are below most peoples radar. The people who win, are the ones who realise that customer experience is everything, and they build a super fast and effective site and host it on a dedicated server for that added umph. Before they know it, they are getting customers from Google, and the customers are coming back in their droves because the experience is perfect.

When we explain to people that their site is slow, they don’t understand. They look at their own site and say, “it seems fast to me!” This is the biggest misconception. They are ususally viewing a cached version of their website on their own local machine. What does this mean? Well basically, your machine stores images of sites that you visit regularly. So it stands to reason that when you look at your own site, you do so though rose coloured spectacles. You are in effect getting an artificial view of how your business is really NOT performing.

On the flip side through your customers eyes, it doesn’t hide the harsh truth, that for new visitors, your site is like jelly waiting to set.

This is particularly noticeable for people who end up hosting in the US to save money. People can simply drop out of the UK arm of Google once the search engine picks up the foreign IP address. Google simply assumes that your main focuss is probably aimed at the foreign market, as your site will perform better in the country where it is hosted. Some of the largest hosting providers in the UK, host their customers in the US and Germany. Rackspace host thousands of their clients sites in the US on their Cloud environment. One and One (1&1) a German company who also own Fasthosts, who market themselves a the hosting worlds market leader , host their servers in Germany!

Personally I believe keeping it simple is the best way. Host your site as near to your customers as you can. We are lucky, by being in Manchester we couldn’t really be more central to the whole of the UK.

I hear horror stories all the time on this subject. One thing worse than going abroad to host, is taking it in house! The ultimate in stupidity. Let’s stick our server on the end of our broadband connection or a leased line. So what if it is 100Mb. You may as well attach it via string! Yes it might work occasionally but not enough to get noticed on the search engines. Telcos for years simply resold 100Mb lines time and time again, and guess what? They attached them to a 100Mb line. The ultimate in bottlenecking.

If you imagine the internet works on the basis of regions. You can host your store on the main high street, the Oxford Street or you could host it on a back street. Which gets more traffic? Obviously the high Street. Yet so many businesses spend 10′s of thousands of pounds on their websites, yet they think they dont need to invest in their hosting. They think they can simply stick it on some shared space, or a cheap dedicated server (down a back street). Even worse, they dont realsie why it doesn’t work properly or why they dont get awesome results.

At the same time, we come across small businesses who take our advice or dip their toe in the water with UKFast. Experience the speed of the UKFast network and then get addicted. These companies listen to their customers and upgrade every time their site slows down by a fraction. These are the businesses who are the next generation. It is not the brands you know about, these are the new kids who a carving out a new horizon. They not only get my vote, they get my help and support in every way. They are the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

So be warned. If you have a business and you are NOT taking your online marketing seriously, or worse still you are spending the bulk of your budget on the design and leave nothing for the location of your window to the world, you will not get the results you are wanting, but you will get what you deserve.

This does sound harsh, but it is a really harsh world out there.

If you are a web developer or you run a business designing sites, if you are hosting your sites on a single server to save money or to create a revenue stream, although you may think you are doing your client a favour, you are actually suffocating their business. If you wish to try a server to see the difference, drop me an email at UKFast or post me a comment. Every business I have tried this with has increased sales. Its not  rocket science, but it will certainly pay for one!

It is a good question. I often wonder how and why I ended up in a career so similarly named to one I had been involved with in a previous life.

As an event organiser, I essentially hosted parties for businesses. It involved the ultimate in commitment and service, a degree of attention to detail you seldom see and passion to keep you striving when the going gets tough. First up, last to bed….. it is a thankless task behind the scenes of a busy event.

The business I had that specialised in this field I sold to Granada at the end of the 90′s. they did me a massive favour. I stayed and learnt so much about bigger business, “how to and how not to run my next venture.” It was great time of my life, but one I treated as a learning experience and I was glad to move on.

And somehow I ended up continuing to host again. This time, people’s lives and peoples entire businesses. I thought managing and hosting peoples parties required the ultimate attention to detail, however this new world really does take my responsibilities to another level.

So, what is hosting? And, why is it called dedicated hosting? It should be called dedicated hosting because my team and I are dedicated to ensuring you have the perfect platform to run and host your business. Actually, it is called “dedicated hosting” because the infrastructure that manages your website or application is dedicated soley to you and your business. This means no neighbouring business can impact on your service if they damage their machine or if they hit a busy period.

I do think my previos life has helped UKFast massively. I was talking to a senior official at Microsoft (who incidentally we host too) and he said the level of service we provide is so much over and above even our nearest competitor. He explained he felt this was to do with our attention to detail and sheer passion for customer service. “In a technical environment UKFast are just on another level. Where businesses in your sector are usually driven by process and techies, we find ourselves focussing on people and their needs.”

Thanks for that observation Bill. Most kind. Ironically, having the passionate people around has made us focus more on the technology side of things and 10 years later we find UKFast not only the market leader in the dedicated server area, we also deliver our product faster than any other provider on the planet. Our network is focussed too on speed. And there is no coincidence that we released information about the link between FAST websites which become more successful and gaining better rankings with Google.

I am confident, we are something to do with Google letting the cat out of the bag towards the speed link after we got a letter from Google asking us to remove the information with Speed and Googles rating of faster sites. After a few letters backwards and forwards I finally wrote to the lawyers at Google asking one simple question. “So what you are saying is that there is NO link between faster servers and higher search engine results.”

We were immediately engaged with the big G, who were intrigued with our confidence. What no one knew is we have been testing all the major networks around the world for a decade and we even have servers on our main competitors. Each one is used to test various sites and the results they produce. By 2006, UKFast had already deduced there was a significant link between speed and happy customers.

Aptly named UKFast! Interestingly it comes from the importance I put on customer service and the fact that I believed that the internet will be no different to every other walk of life. We want everything NOW!!!

It is very funny though. I have some awesome quotes from angry competitors about some of our claims. They really thought that the thing was a marketing ruse. Little did they know we have had servers with them for years and we still do. Knowing ones enemy is an important part of the game in my opinion. how else do we develop if we cant identify strengths and weaknesses efficiently and accurately.

When a business describes themselves as “fanatical” for example, I want to know to what extent? I am always intrigued to hear other business owners claims, just as they are to hear ours. I don’t blame them for misunderstanding them. You’d have to be a little over obsessive to go to the lengths we go to to drive our business harder and further than everyone else. Nevertheless that is what we do.

One day I’ll publish some of the ridiculous comments that the leader of some of the largest hosting providers have said. “there is no reason for speed to improve peoples results,” “It is irrelevant” , “what about all the money you are missing out on by contending your network…. they will never know….. we make millions from the excess bandwidth charges.”

For me, whatever you are hosting… customer service is key. Keeping your client happy is the ultimate game. Being honest with your clients is the only way. Yes it might take longer to build an empire, but it is then built on stronger foundations.

Google the internet giant that grew from a garage start up in San Francisco has a competitor. As an underdog myself in the hosting world fighting to grow our business, I have to favour the smaller player.

It is not often that you can refer to one of Bill Gate’s enterprises as a smaller entity.

But smaller for how long?

A little like a boxer who smiles at his opponent in the ring when he feels a punch that cuts him to the quick, he makes too much effort to hide the pain. Recently Google have been sparring in similar style scoring points with Microsoft over petty issues. In my opinion they merely give Bing the limelight and raise their credibility.

The signing of a 10 year deal though between Microsoft and Yahoo must hurt. These are 2 very large competitors joining forces, sharing resources. Both retaining the side of the bargain they do best. Yahoo running the PPC, (the model that Google plagerised) and bing with the search engine, who surprisingly is faster that Google.

These extra milliseconds set Google out from other pretenders over the years, yet the secret is out, it is common news to those of us involved with SEO and dedicated hosting.

Google have to be concerned. If you break down the traffic that all the engines get separately it doesn’t seem that threatening, with Bing’s share of all UK traffic at 0.44%. Combine it with Yahoo’s 0.99% and add in all the other MSN related traffic and it reaches a staggering 17.1%.

It is interesting that MSN hasn’t made a move to acquire search providers that already use Googles’ search capacity such as Ask and AOL as this would increase their distribution and reduce Googles’ at the same time. I am confident that they will be talking, whether a deal can be reached or not, if Microsoft want to take on Google this acquisition accelerates their growth curve and takes out a further healthy chunk of the market.

On a wider international scale, I’m sure all the major search providers are thinking about the global strategy of getting Baidu in China and Yandex in Russia involved as the global distribution battle commences.

Why is this? Is Google acknowledging that faster sites give the customer a better experience? Absolutely! Is traditional SEO as we know it dead or is it evolving at such a pace that it has caught a large proportion of the SEO enthusiasts and internet users by surprise? Could it be that speed has always been a major deciding factor in ranking and no one knew about it?

Or did we?

For the last 6 or 7 years we have been watching clients with faster machines and lean sites soar to the top of the rankings. Not only this we have witnessed that when sites have slowed down, through congestion at peak times or with network or routing failures, they loose traffic and consequently customers.

A fantastic example of this and believe me I have hundreds was a site called Cheapest Flights.co.uk. The entrepreneur, Andy Speight, who set this up, built one of the fastest growing travel web sites in just a couple of years. Its growth was so impressive it attracted attention from TravelCare who ended up buying the business for millions. We had extensive meetings with TravelCare over their change-management procedure, as they decided to move the site to their in-house datacentre as part of the cost savings after the acquisition.

What they underestimated was all of Speights reseach and the lengths he and UKFast engineers and R&D team had gone to with regards to the hosting environment Cheapestflights was on. Speight had truly pushed the boat out, he deduced that slow downs at certain times during the day had a direct effect to his business with reductions in sales. He instructed UKFast to build him the fastest solution we had, load balanced, clustered, it had everything.

The results were phenomenal, his traffic went through the roof and the customer experience improved dramatically resulting in higher customer numbers, leads and direct conversion rates. Each time he upgraded the solution, the results just kept getting better.

I received a telephone call first thing one Monday morning from a very angry director of Travel Care. I was very distressed to hear that there was something radically wrong with the cheapestflights web site and that orders from their website were down massively. We take great pride in providing the very best service at all times even when clients are moving away. We have an astonishing rate of customers who return after leaving so we are careful to never burn bridges. I called my IT director immediately.

Neil Lathwood was perplexed. He is a lot more pragmatic than me. He simply called me back and calmly explained the poor results were down to their own network, not ours. He showed me the speed difference, it was staggering. Travel Care had moved the site over the weekend and the speed difference alone had begun to decimate their business.

The site never recovered and it lost momentum and credibility with search engines and customers. It dropped out of the Alexa.com top 1000 to become a shadow of its former self at an embarrassing 1,799,379th place when I looked a few minutes ago.

So why is Google bothered by this? Surely Google is just interested in land grab and their PPC model. Absolutely not!

If you understand Google’s model and what motivates the Google team, you will understand and unlock the key to true online success.

Just like Bill Gates said, “how do we become the intelligence that runs all the computers in the world?” when he founded Microsoft, the young men in Google have similar aspirations.

“How do we become the definitive doorway to the internet?

When you ask a great question like that, you start to look for great answers. In this quest for the answer, Google realised that they need to provide the very best search results and the absolute best customer experience.

Google analysed their customers and their user experience and found that the most important factor was not the number of links on a page, or the meta information, or one of the countless SEO rules we hear about, but the speed. The speed determined whether or not customers got bored waiting for sites to load.

We have all done it haven’t we, where you click back because of a tiny delay? Well guess what, they are measuring that and in our opinion, they have been for some time.

So during the discussion I had about search engine optimisation, I was challenged to provide evidence of Google’s stance.

Firstly, Google posts on their own site that landing page quality and Quality Score will be negatively affected if a keyword is graded ‘This page loads slowly’. The full details are presented by Google on the Adwords page below.

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=87144

I have also enclosed a UKFast pdf which summarises the Google stance. I am specifically referring to item 4 on the ‘Google load time advice’ PDF:

http://pdf.ukfast.net/google_load_time_advice.pdf

Secondly Google advises website owners to contact their hosting provider if they are experiencing slow load time.

http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=93116

My third and final point is more emotive. Google like any corporate body take their revenues very seriously. Yet they are prepared to sacrifice some of this for fast sites with good quality scores. Why is this?

It is safe to assume that as they take speed seriously in the PPC model, they also view speed as equally important with their non paid for search.

Remember this, Google does not publish a list of what to do, like the top 100 things to make your site go up the search engines. SEO experts have simply deduced their findings from things that have happened to their sites. (Increases and decreases in traffic directly linked to recent changes they have made.)

The problem with this method of research is that they are comparing these to their own sites that they manage and not the Internet as a whole. How can this be accurate? They are not able to analyse all their changes in relation to the changes all other website owners are making. This would take an impossible coordinated effort.

However, at UKFast we are taking an active role in trying to speed up commerce and at the same time understand the search engines and what makes customers choose and leave sites. We have spent almost a decade with an R&D team always around 20% of our workforce splitting the Google atom.

With hundreds of thousands of domain names on our network and clever pieces of kit like our CISCO GUARD anomaly detector which funnily enough looks for anomalies and unusual spikes in traffic or our IDS and IPS which track and prevent unwanted intrusions, our unique CTM software (Capacity Threshold Monitoring) we are able to spot a change in a sites behaviour in an instant. Often it turns out to be a genuine increase in traffic. When this happens we all get excited, contact the site owner and put on our Google analysis hats.

Overwhelmingly the majority of increases in traffic to sites are directly linked to an increase in server or site speed. So a leaner web site on the same server is a great place to start.

Ironically if you look at a well SEO’d web site, they are text heavy with very little imagery. It is highly likely the leanness of the site is winning the great results. Imagine what is possible when you upgrade onto a faster network.

And this is where the fun begins.

I remember 7 or 8 years ago, sat at an ISPA event talking with some hosting company owners. Their businesses dwarfed UKFast at this point in time. They ridiculed the UKFast idea that speed was important. They thought I was missing a trick and they both proudly explained how they were maximing profit by reselling the same bandwidth (contending) over and over and over again. What frustrated me most was they were so pleased with themselves that their customers would never know!

And businesses are still doing it. Hosting companies who offer unlimited bandwidth or terabits of traffic can simply not be telling the truth if they promise an uncontended network. What happens when the internet users start to use the promised traffic.

Take the top hosting providers who make these large promises and you do the maths. If everyone of the 1000’s of businesses on their networks, all demanded the traffic promised in one month, in my opinion their networks would collapse. They probably would struggle if people require 25% of their allowance! It is a nice idea to be able to offer so much traffic, but it is simply not feasible because in the long run, as the internet grows, so does the need for bandwidth. Sadly, aggressive marketing often takes precedence over common sense.

The good news is, long before we knew that speed was fundamentally important, we realised that with a name like UKFast, we’d better live up to our name, and the result? UKFast customers are growing like wildfire.

So a decade on, although it is immensely rewarding to be larger and more profitable than the 2 businesses who scorned our honest approach to hosting and this is clearly one of those occasions where less is more, I have to attribute a lot of our success to good fortune and plain old fashioned luck that we find ourselves in this position now. Still fortune favours the brave and I am a big believer in karma, especially in business.

Finally if there are any SEO experts out there who still need convincing, just remember that your industry massive as it is, is built on supposition. If you are asked to name the top most important SEO ingredient I guarantee it will differ from expert to expert.

Speed is one ingredient which is easy to track. Try it, the results are awe inspiring.

For the ever demanding customer, website response rates have to be immediate. How long do you spend on a slow page which doesn’t load properly? My guess is not long at all. And neither do your potential customers.

For slow websites the click-away rate is often incredibly high – and what do web users do when they’ve clicked away? They go to the next search engine listing, which just happens to be your fiercest competitor.

Speaking of search engines, many of the top ones use website response rate and server speed as part of the ranking process.

When a website responds more quickly, search engines see the site as more reputable and of a higher quality. These sites are rewarded because they offer a good customer experience and so they’re boosted higher in search rankings.

Fast websites are always located on quick and powerful dedicated servers. The hosting solution will often include more than one dedicated server for increased stability and performance – but that’s for another blog.

When you choose an internet hosting provider make sure you check out the reliability of their hardware. The speed of your server is as vital as other parts of your online marketing campaign.

Meta, keywords, PPC, dynamic content, great design and link building are all successful methods with which to advertise online. But what’s a great campaign if the website it’s based around is too slow to keep the attention of your customers?

Currently the trend shows:
• SEO at 46%
• Link building at 26%
• PPC at 20%
• PR at 9%

However, if this was reversed would it really be so bad?

The highest ranking is currently SEO – if there is such a thing. This made me contemplate things. What exactly is SEO and how do we use it?

Search engine optimisation has evolved with the internet and it relies on a series of complex rules to place businesses in order of relevance to your search.

However, what’s the point in attempting to optimise your site if content isn’t regularly changed?

If your content isn’t changed, Google probably won’t recognise it anyway.
Plus, if content is substandard, no matter how high you get in the search engines, you continue to find that leads don’t convert into sales. People won’t stay on the site long enough to buy from you if the pages aren’t interesting.

At 26% and 20%, link building and PPC came in second and third which I find strange. Pay per click can be the most costly solution and therefore you’d think it would rank more highly in public opinion.

Coming in last place with a vote of just 9% is PR. In my opinion this has many more online uses than a lot of people realise.

Online PR has even more benefits in addition to the traditional function of building your brand and getting your business in the press.

With online PR you can distribute your release across the web in various different portals.

There are a plethora of online publications just waiting for your release. Not only are these sites trawled by local, national and international media relations professionals, each one can be linked back to your site.

As you know, links to your site increase your Google page rank and your position in the search engines, as well as serving to build your company reputation and get some press. So that’s dealing with link building, SEO and PR in one fell swoop.

And sending a press release is free.

By writing press releases you are essentially killing an entire flock of birds with one stone and yet figures show so many businesses don’t hold the idea in high regard.

In my opinion, the sooner you embrace the press release the better for your business.

In light of recent travesties such as 25million records disappearing from a government database in a day, it is no wonder data protection is a hot topic. With the storage of more online data than ever before, security worries are multiplying quickly.

There are several reasons for protecting your databases, including customer confidentiality, protecting your client base and keeping the secret to your business’s success.

Client records must be kept safe under the Data Protection Act, which states customer information must be: “kept secure with appropriate technical and organisational measures taken to protect the information”.

Trade secrets are your business’s foundations. CocaCola for example, is unlikely to give away the secret of its taste to new employees. Not only would competitors be able to make the drink themselves, but the company would lose the mystical brand image that has been cultivated for over a hundred years.

Similarly, with regards to my web development company, Text, if somebody was to gain access to our coding, we would lose the competitive advantages we gained through hard work and dedication. If other companies start to use our coding it makes all our hard work trivial.

As your company increases in size, you employ more new people who you have to grow to trust over time. If there are no restrictions on company computers just think what could be carried away on a USB drive or sent via web based email.

Employee access to personal applications at work is something which differs for every company, of course. But in my opinion it is something to be seriously considered in your business strategy. Think carefully. A company depends upon its databases. It is a director’s duty to protect them. By eliminating opportunity you can ease concern that your own data can be removed.

Businesses have several ways of protecting important information. Limiting access to specific drives, disabling USB ports and blocking web based email accounts are just a number of ways.

I know of several managing directors who take these strategies to the absolute pinnacle but I’m a believer that with some standard procedures in place you can be sure that your in-house databases are safe.

As managers you may worry about your company gaining a reputation for being dictatorial with such precautions, however there are compensations you can take on board to avoid this feeling. Installing computer terminals in the staff room that are not attached to the company network is just one of these. This can allow staff to view web based email accounts in their break times without the concern that they can attach and send company information. The history of their work email can be recorded and this is deterrent enough.

As is often the case, instilling a great work ethic within your team is the secret to success but it always pays to stay secure and reduce risk.

This week a study by Tiscali showed that more than a third of UK consumers log on to watch TV on demand. The figures show double the amount on last year, of people watching television online. I’m sure you’ll agree that’s an astounding increase.

The statistics reflect a growing trend in viewing and producing online video. It is a media format most definitely has its good points – providing dynamic web content on platform that can be seen the world over. And it also has its bad points. I’m recalling the recent happy-slapping craze which swept video download site YouTube.

Online video downloading also has the potential to financially cripple the entertainments industry as downloading free and often illegal video beats buying it by four to one.

But for better or worse, internet video is here, and its here to stay.
For businesses, advertising, marketing and communications videocasting has massive, almost untapped, potential.

For example, when designing your website it’s important to remember that content is king. Lots of text is wonderful for search engine spiders, but it is not just robots who read your web pages. Even if you manage to get a top spot in the search engines, if your content isn’t up to scratch, your organisation’s message is lost.

By adding video content to your site you automatically increase your validity as a company, appearing bigger and more authoritative. Additionally you open up a medium to provide a direct message to your audience.

Video attracts visitors and keeps them. It’s proven that consumers don’t stay long on pages that bore them, which is why reams and reams of text may not convert your hits into sales. Online film gives a face or personality to a format which is otherwise quite flat. It builds a trust with your customers, and can be both informative and entertaining.

In the years to come, videocasting will become more and more commonplace, so start now. Be ahead of the game and your online business will benefit no end. At UKFast , we have had a massive interest in our new videocasting department. We’re producing broadcast quality video for our clients as well as ourselves and the standard of dynamic content we are providing has given some glowing testimonials.

My advice is this: don’t stop writing content, it’s still important to have substantial information on your site. But if you haven’t already, definitely consider dynamic content like podcasts or videocasts to really capture your audience’s attention.

Firstly it’s important to weigh up where your advert appears in the rankings. Are you going up are you going down? It is imperative that you measure your results.

However, are you aware that Google calculates the number of times you view the adverts? If you do not click on them, after a relatively short time (undisclosed by Google) your advert disappears!

Don’t worry it is still there for the rest of the world to see, however the search engine recognises that you keep ignoring it, so it serves you something else instead.

Very clever, but how do you check your adverts with out affecting the potency of the campaign?

Simple, go to:
https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

This allows you to see all the adverts without any interference. This way you get to see everyone, including competitors etc. At the same time, by not clicking on competitors adverts, they are removed from the list as well, so it is easy to get a false sense of who really is competing in your market place.

You might be asking why does it matter to use the tool, and so what if you can’t see them, as long as your customers do?

Rest assured, Google is calculating the potency of your click-throughs and the volume of adverts that are being shown. Literally every view counts and therefore to guarantee best results, use the tool. In my opinion you should use this for natural SEO too, not just “pay per click”.

Please note you can’t click through to the various sites from this page it is merely a read only application.

Is there such a thing as the perfect online form? Unfortunately there is no form that is going to satisfy all the individuals who will visit your site.

The more information you insist on, the more likely you will put off potential visitors. There is an argument for stating that, if a visitor is not prepared to give you all the relevant information from the outset, they are not a serious customer and they will not buy.

Unfortunately it is not as simple as that. We have clients who have refused to give phone numbers and company emails at the point of gathering marketing collateral, so as not to get bombarded by sales people at a later date. Those people eventually became clients.

It is true that they are few are far between, but do you want to frighten them off?

There are definite benefits to asking for “required fields” in an online form to deter competitors picking up your latest literature; however a persistent competitor will always get their hands on your brochures eventually. But you may be right not to make it too easy.

I had a client who insisted on changing his online form asking for all fields to be filled in as mandatory. Three weeks later after he’d forgotten that he made this change, he approached my marketing manager to ask her why his leads had significantly decreased. He’d insisted on the change because he felt a large proportion of the leads were not serious. The problem was by making the change he frightened off 82% of the leads of which more than half of those would have been potential clients.

Sometimes it is better to tidy up your database in the back ground, and have a high volume of enquiries that you can then be selective with once you get into discussion.

My advice is shorten the form unless you have something that is so unique that people will jump through hoops to give you their details. Obviously if you are running an e-commerce site, these days people will expect to have to give out all their personal details. But remember to make the form as simple as possible.

1. If there are four or five steps involved, show that from the outset. This inhibits people from getting bored.

2. Make sure the hosting is super fast. This is the single most important part of the online transaction outside of the security in my opinion. An ugly fast site will win over a cumbersome pretty one every time. We are all in a hurry and we do NOT like to wait.

3. Use an SSL (secure socket layer) secure certificate to protect your customer’s identity.

4. Do not gather credit card details or personal information and then simply email to your office. This is not secure, yet so many businesses do it.

5. Keep the form as simple and as short as possible.

6. Use mouse over boxes with question marks in that people can hover over to find out what each field represents. Do not leave anything to the imagination. Keep you visitor focussed on the one goal of completing the transaction.

Follow these simple guide lines and you won’t go far wrong. Be careful not to copy a competitor’s site too. You have no idea whether or not they have done it correctly. At the same time they may be copying yours! If you want ideas, use common sense. Go to a site that you regularly buy from and I’ll guarantee they follow the majority of the principals I’ve listed above.

At UKFast we are privileged to be hosting thousands of web sites. We are able to see who is doing well and whose sites are failing. From these sites we are able to put together a comprehensive guide to the do’s and don’ts of web hosting and SEO. The two are closely linked.

There is a wealth of information available on best practices in SEO however who is correct? Is there a definitive list?

The majority of people professing to understand the art of SEO are keen to charge you whatever you are prepared to pay, however they are not prepared to give you guaranteed results.

It is our aim to help give free advice out to our UKFast clients and to anyone who wants to contribute. The next focus group boasts marketing and SEO experts from some of the largest or fastest growing sites on the Internet. We will be feeding back our findings in the new year via pod cast and email newsletter with links to SEO help areas and a dedicated SEO wiki.

If you feel you have a great understanding of this subject and you wish to contribute please contact jonathan.bowers@harperjames.com for a discussion.

UKFast in the media
Server hosting by UKFast

I break down true online success into 3 categories.

1. Invest in the right infrastructure
2. Respect the search engines
3. Put your web site at the heart of your business

1. As the managing director of a hosting company, I am in danger of looking biased when I say that your hosting platform is a key ingredient, but I am well placed to give this advice. Since 1999 we have seen the rise and fall and the rise again of this fantastic industry. With over a thousand successful clients we are in a good position to analyse what companies are doing right and also what they are doing wrong.

There are some definite trends emerging. Out of every successful client we host, each one of them takes their hosting environment very seriously. Why? Because customer experience is important to them. They have learnt that fast web pages mean happy customers.

Have you ever gone to google or yahoo, typed in something and then clicked straight back because it took too long? Of course you have. You do it every day. Well there is a danger so are your potential customers. You might think your site is acceptable, but then again, is it cached in your machines memory? So wherever you host, do it right.

2. Respecting the search engines is a complicated conundrum. It was described by one of my fellow speakers yesterday Clare Johnson from Adoofa, as a “dark art.” She is absolutely correct when she said that no one can promise to put you top of the search engines and guarantee it. The reason being is that you would come across someone equally competitive who potentially will knock you off your pedestal. All you can do is treat it as a race that never ends. Once you are committed, you see the benefit and you are hooked.

There are so many pitfalls to SEO (search engine optimisation) that I cannot do the subject justice, so I will be revisiting this topic regularly, and inviting others to contribute.

3. Put your web site at the heart of your business and give it the resources that it needs to survive. I went on a solicitors site yesterday as I am moving house. I knew who I wanted to use, I just needed their phone number. I gave up looking after clicking through about 5 or 6 pages. The irony is that firm of solicitors has clearly spent a lot of money developing its online brand. Yet they are able to make fundamental mistakes which will frighten off prospective clients. I would never do business with someone who does not clearly show their contact details on a web site. I also prefer to do business with people who are passionate so this needs to come across in every aspect of your business dealings. Again there is much to discuss on this topic too and I am keen to explore this in great detail and hear from other marketers about their experiences.

To get a brief summary about last night from Jonathan Bowers communication manager at UKFast click on Jonathan’s link
So what questions do you have? Where do you need help?