So where would you use Dropbox?well suppose you had a great day out with friends and wanted to share the photos you took with them, simple open a Dropbox account and invite them into the shared folder.  If you own or run a business and you need to share large files between your sales team for example or maybe a potential customer wants pictures now of that great car you’re selling.  All this can be accomplished through Dropbox I cant recommend it enough, and what is more the service is FREE.

You heard it correct Dropbox works on a freemium basis so they offer a free account of 2GB and of course you could have a paid account of upto 1TB, everytime someone joins through a referral link you gain an additional 250Gb of space on your account, thus encouraging users to share – as I have done here.

You can visit the Dropbox site clicking on this link here as I said I cannot recommend it highly enough so go on try it out, its FREE!

This post follows on from my free Google grants for Charities that can be found on my blog here.

If you are a Charity and want to use the power of YouTube to connect with your supports through this incredibly popular visual medium then YouTube can help through its non-profit program that over four distinct program benefits.

1. premium branding and increased upload capability
2. you will be listed on the not for profit channels and video pages on YouTube
3. you can add calls to action overlayed on the video, so you have space to add a message and YouTube encourage you to do just that.
4. finally you have the option to ask ‘the crowd’ so you could for instance asked an expert YouTuber to create a video just for your charity.

As with all YouTube content there are some basic rules to follow;

• Upload videos that get the viewers watching and talking, then ensure you answer any responses you get.
• Upload content regularly, much like your website don’t let it go stale.
• Don’t forget to embed the code for the video across other platform, news, blog and Twitter to name but three.
• And finally be yourself, if you are fake then you will be found out!

You can find out more on http://www.youtube.com/nonprofits

As with all website development to increase over time the TOP method has to be developing quality content, this will by its very nature attract and maintain an audience as opposed to artificially increasing your Alexa rank, so try to work the two together.

1. Install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox’s SearchStatus extension. Then set your site as your homepage – every day you get one visit, this has to be the first step.

2. Put the Alexa rank widget on your website. Show you support Alexa and take it seriously, how do you expect others to if you don’t? – I have….

3. Get other using the Alexa toolbar, friends, followers website visitors and link to it so they can clearly see what this entails.

4. Ask these friends to review and rate your Alexa profile, mine is here can you add a review?

5. Add something on your site about Alexa, write a blog post – if its good and helpful people with link to it and this will send you targeted traffic.

6. Keep up the comments on other blogs’ forums etc, I wrote a post all about this here. Why leave Blog Comments and What you get out of it.

These are simple Alexa strategies that anyone can do and they will make a difference to your Alexa ranking. The end goal has to be more visitors to your home page and then interacting with the site. So with this in mind I make no apologies for again mentioning the need for quality content, if you create a positive experience for your users they will return.

Anyone got any more tips to add for improving their Alexa rankings?

The first thing to remember is that ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ (or SEO for short) is not an exact science, there are things that we can do (and you) to try and influence the position of your website in search engine rankings but at the end of the day it’s down to Google (or Yahoo, or MSN etc) and not us to decide which site goes where in the listings. There are over 100 different factors that the search engines take into account when deciding the position of a web site, a good web developer will generally concentrate on the most important of those factors. Many of the things that influence the rankings are not even visible to the average user of the website. Things like page titles, hidden meta data, number of inbound links to the site etc. have a very large influence but don’t worry a good web developer will take care of this part for you.

As you may or may not know, the actual written content of your website is important and this is where you can actually help towards the SEO of the site. Simply write your content (or use a skilled copywriter) to ensure a number of your ‘Keywords and Key-phrases’ are used throughout. These are the important words on your site that you want to get found for in Google for searches and also similar and related searches. A keyword might be something like ‘jewellery’, whilst Key-phrases are usually a combination of 2, 3 or 4 keywords, for example ‘sterling silver jewellery’. Ideally we want the key-phrases to be in the same order that someone might actually type them into Google. Here are some basic guidelines for the descriptions.

• Remember that the content is for end user and should be clear to them.
• Use keywords and key-phrases frequently to increase search engine positions for these. (This makes the page seem more relevant to the search engines for people searching for these words and phrases).
• However don’t over use them, so that it doesn’t read well or just looks weird, make sure it flows and sounds natural.
• Keep the descriptions relevant to product.
• Be direct. Use short sentences. Break up the text with line breaks. Search engines don’t actually bother reading punctuation or line breaks but for users, it’s easier to read if it’s spaced out and not one big chunk of text.
• Use lists if appropriate; these are concise and easy to read.
• Don’t be afraid to repeat a little bit to get your point across, this could mean summarising with a final sentence or paragraph containing important keywords. However, it’s important to ensure that it doesn’t look weird or out of place.
• Up to 300 words on the page is ideal for most products and services. If there’s not much to say then it’s not always good to put something there just for the sake of it.

You can gain good website traffic through article marketing simply by having a well written article in these article directories, and here are my top 5 tips for great article submission.

1. Choose a good Ezine directory, there are lots around you only need to Google ‘Ezine’ and you get over 10 million results.

2. When you have chosen a directory then register yourself as Ezine author, its easy to do and once you have chose the directory you want you need to create in effect your profile that hold more info about you, you can see mine here.

3. Create lots of articles, I know this is pretty self explanatory but the more you create on lots of different topics the more you will be listed in search engines for these topics. Don’t forget to proof read all your articles, you don’t want one going live that’s just gibberish.

4. You must use keywords and keyphrases in your articles in accordance with your overall SEO strategy, don’t forget also to include these keywords in the article title also.

5. Keep at it, it’s easy after the first flourish to stop submitting articles but you really need to keep at it and keep submitting so you build up a nice little ‘group’ of articles.

Generating traffic through article marketing is relatively easy with the help of the Ezine article directory, I have 10 Active articles, resulting in 916 views and that is in 6 months, not a bad result I think. Just follow these steps and you won’t go far wrong and you will begin to generate serious traffic for your site.

Have a look at mine here: http://ezinearticles.com/?expert_bio=Alistair_Gleave

I like it when a customer can produce a number of documents and help you help them, it may be you both site down and ‘thrash’ it out, I have seen layouts on post if notes, A3 pads – basically whatever helps clarify what you require will help a web company.


So i have summarised my 3 top tips below.

• What do you do, business wise, products youmay sell, and how do you achieve this currently?

This is your opportunity to ‘sell’ you business, you are approaching web companies so they can help you, and the best way for them to help you is to understand what it is you do.

• What do you want the website to achieve, is it lower costs, selling into new markets or simply getting new sales leads.

There may be opportunities here to have demonstrated new ways of doing something; email marketing for instance is very cost effective compared with print. A company I worked for recently just wanted to reduce their reliance on mail order so I helped them go online and in 2 years their site has turned over £1 million, and from a standing start this is very good.

• What system have you in place to develop and manage this site through the build stages to launch, in terms of in house contact through to PR an ongoing budget when the site is launched.

I believe this is one of the most important aspects of a [tag]web development[/tag] and often overlooked, just who will provide the copy? Who is going to sign off the design? Etc etc. Then when the site is due to go live, any pre PR planned even if a holding page to collect data upto the launch date itself all needs to be planned and budgeted for, you shouldn’t just rely on the site going live and there you go, let’s sit back and watch the leads/sales roll on in – IT WONT HAPPEN.

Any web company worth their salt will take you through the whole process from start to finish and guide you through the opportunities – some of which you may never have heard off or thought off – it’s their job.

And finally we always like to know a timescale and budget as realistically the only thing that constrains a site is the client brief and budget, you may now want to give one but it doesn’t half help.

The first thing to remember is that ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ (or SEO for short) is not an exact science, there are things that we can do to try and influence the position in the site in the rankings but at the end of the day it’s down to Google (or Yahoo, or MSN etc) and not us to decide which site goes where. There are over 100 different factors that the search engines take into account when deciding the position of a web site, we concentrate on the most important of those factors. Many of the things that influence the rankings are not even visible to the average user of the website. Things like page titles, hidden meta data, number of inbound links to the site etc. have a very large influence but don’t worry we will take care of this part for you.

As you may know, the content of the site is important and this is where you can help towards the SEO of the site. Keywords and Key-phrases These are the important words on your site that we want to get found for in Google for searches and also similar and related searches. A keyword might be something like ‘jewellery’, whilst Key-phrases are usually a combination of 2, 3 or 4 keywords, for example ‘sterling silver jewellery’. Ideally we want the key-phrases to be in the same order that someone might actually type them into Google. Here are some basic guidelines for the descriptions.

• Remember that the content is for end user and should be clear to them.
• Use keywords and key-phrases frequently to increase search engine positions for these. (This makes the page seem more relevant to the search engines for people searching for these words and phrases).
• However don’t over use them, so that it doesn’t read well or just looks weird, make sure it flows and sounds natural.
• Keep the descriptions relevant to product.
• Be direct. Use short sentences. Break up the text with line breaks. Search engines don’t actually bother reading punctuation or line breaks but for users, it’s easier to read if it’s spaced out and not one big chunk of text.
• Use lists if appropriate; these are concise and easy to read.
• Don’t be afraid to repeat a little bit to get your point across, this could mean summarising with a final sentence or paragraph containing important keywords. However, it’s important to ensure that it doesn’t look weird or out of place.
• Up to 300 words on the page is ideal for most products and services. If there’s not much to say then it’s not always good to put something there just for the sake of it.