British shoppers spent more online than ever before in the run-up to Christmas. The snappily titled IMRG Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index shows that UK shoppers spent £5.46 billion online in December —the equivalent of £88.93 for every person in the UK.

This is a 17% increase on December 2008. Recession, what recession?

“2010 looks set to produce another year of strong results for e-retail, with demand expected to remain high as consumers habitually look online for best buys, and a pipeline of significant improvements emerge, including wider product range availability, even better websites and a greater choice of convenient and more reliable delivery options,”

James Roper the chief exec of IMRG.

If your online sales didn’t grow by at least 17% last year you need to be asking yourself why? What should you be doing today to ensure that your growth in 2010 is as strong as the wider market if not significantly higher?

Look at your AdWords account and ask if your click through rate could be improved by 17%?  Could you improve your conversion rate by 17%? Would a 17% increase in daily budget bring a 17% increase in sales?

How many extra customers would you find by listing your products in Google product search?

Contextured can help you improve your web marketing and so increase your online sales. Start a free trial today and see how long it takes to lock-in 17% gains. http://www.blogcatalog.com/directory/technology/internet/seo

If you’ve ever worried that the money you spend on pay per click is being wasted then don’t feel alone. When you see the clicks coming in but the sales needle doesn’t move, it’s easy to start worrying about your return on investment. The truth is that it is all too easy to waste money with online advertising.

Everything you do is a potential minefield from the ads you write, the keywords you select, right down to the way you structure your account. Any little mistake or deviation from the “perfect” setup can end up wasting your budget.

So if you are about to create an advertising campaign what should you do to minimize wastage? Try following these simple steps:

1. Always separate search and content campaigns
2. Always have multiple ads per ad group
3. Never have too many keywords per ad group
4. Always set negative keywords
5. Start small and grow

If you already have campaigns running that break all of the above rules, it’s probably worth starting again with fresh campaigns. Click through rate has a massive impact on Quality Score and if you’ve already got a really bad long-term CTR on a campaign or ad group it may be irredeemable.

If you find you need a bit of AdWords Help you may want to consider registering for Contextured.  — Currently available on a Free Trial for new users!— Contextured will help you get the most out of your online advertising budget.

If I’ve set this up correctly then this post is coming via posterous

If you have ever searched online for anything, from specific products down to entertainment information, then either consciously or subconsciously you will have done so using several keywords or keyword phrases. If it was a topic you didn’t know a lot about the chances are that you refined your search more and more as you went along to achieve more targeted and relevant results. So why am I mentioning this? Well because the reality is that you get better search results when the keyword or keyword phrases you type in Google are more accurate, and it is the same with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

SEO relevancy refers to the use of relevant keywords in page titles, domain names, headers, content and links. If you wish to achieve a high ranking for a targeted keyword or keyword phrase that you know your target audience are going to search with in Google, then it’s important to place these keywords prominently across your website in all the key locations. That means you need to have them carefully included in critical positions and in a natural manner throughout your website.

Once you have done this, you’ll find that the search engines will recognise your site and are able to accuraetly index  you, ranking your site appropriately based upon the keywords placed in the page title, domain name, headers and content. Both website owners and users of search engines come away from the search experience ‘satisfied’ because the consumer found what they were looking for in the search results quickly, and website owners gets more quality hits from genuinely interested visitors.

I think that if you are serious about creating an all rounded relevant online presence meeting consumer needs, refining your keyword selection, and driving more targeted visitors,  the next step you need to undertake is to ensure that relevancy is the backbone to your Pay Per Click (PPC) ad campaigns. Just like SEO, your PPC ads should be created with the goal of placing your company more prominently in the search engines (such as in the side bar ads on Google) and in return should drive more visitors or traffic to your web page.

I believe that relevancy should be applied with care and consideration, both for on-site SEO and in PPC campaigns. If you haven’t considered relevancy when carrying out SEO for your web pages and creating your PPC ad campaigns, then you could be missing out on a large volume of qualified traffic and the profits that such traffic has the potential to yield.

Free Link Love - 4 Point Strategy to Boost Your Sites Back Links

Link building Strategy for Beginners. How to find free link building opportunities….

Creating a large number of back links to your site is one way in which you can help to propel your website up the search engine rankings.  The greater the number of links you have the better. In order to really profit from the linking process, your best bet is to set-up links that originate in anchor text, ideally from external higly relevant and quality sites, as that will help to improve the relevancy and exposure of  your site for the targeted keyword phrases.
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