The Search Engine Shop

Next round of Perth Small Business Workshops

Brendan — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 04:26:44 +0000

Next Small Business Workshops in Perth – 31st May & 2 June We’ve locked in the dates for our next round of workshops in Perth. We’ll be hosting full day workshops on Thursday 31st May and Saturday 2nd June. Thursday’s workshop will cover the cloud, technology and a whole bunch of different tools you can [...]

The Search Engine Shop help's business owners get more hits on their website, get more new customers, reduce cost and make more sales through our unique, proven approach to doing business online and by properly leveraging technology and the internet in their business.

We specialise in areas such as SEO, Adwords Management & Web Design for small businesses.

Small Business Workshop – Tuesday 6th December in Perth

Brendan — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 23:18:39 +0000

We’re back in Perth next week and in conjunction with Lisa from Business Balance and as part of her 100% Performance Small Business Program, we’re hosting a full day small business workshop. The focus will be Tools, Technology & a Sustainable Online Marketing Strategy. The key topics the workshop will cover are: Review the role of technology [...]

Our Standard WordPress Plugins…

Brendan — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 06:11:46 +0000

I get asked this question all the time – which WordPress plugins do you use? Here’s our bog standard list: My Ftp – for easy file editing and uploads from the web console W3 Total Cache to improve the performance of the site Google Analytics for WordPress by Yoast – to integrate Google Analytics SEO [...]

CNEs – a really under-leveraged tool to make you more money

Brendan — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 02:56:23 +0000

Here’s a concept I was introduced a couple of years ago – critical non essentials, the little things in business that help you dominate and crush your competition and create raving fans instead of customers. CNEs are a really simple concept but like most business fundamentals, I personally struggle to leverage a strategy or tactic [...]

Quick RSS/Feedburner tip to increase your subscriber counts…

Brendan — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 08:26:40 +0000

Here’s a quick tip if you run a WordPress blog or are a blogger – you probably knows what Feedburner is….if you don’t and you’re blogging in any serious way then you should so go and Google “feedburner” right now and learn about it! One thing that really gets me is when bloggers don’t setup [...]

New site launch!

Brendan — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 01:25:40 +0000

If you’ve been to the site before you’ll have noticed we’ve just launched a new design this week. I haven’t been happy with the old design for a long long time but with our Achieve More Online workshops and client load we just haven’t had a chance to work on our own site. The new [...]

How to add META Description on Catalog Pages in Business Catalyst WITHOUT duplicates

Brendan — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 03:19:29 +0000

UPDATE: It appears as though this method can still result in duplicate meta descriptions on product tags. The solution only works for category pages with another category page as a child page. Just spent the last hour trawling through the Business Catalyst forums & WIKI trying to work out how to get meta descriptions into [...]

301 redirects in .htaccess on Frontpage site

Brendan — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 02:37:17 +0000

Here’s a quick fix if you’re trying to get .htaccess 301 redirects working on a site that was built using Frontpage (ugh) Ordinarily I just cut and paste some code from our internal doco to redirect domain.com to www.domain.com in .htaccess files and all is sweet but unusually I was getting a 403 error with [...]

WordPress redirecting to /wp-content/w3tc/pgcache/_index.html.gzip

Brendan — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:31:00 +0000

A couple of days ago I added some additional domain names to a client WordPress site that we 301 redirected back to the primary domain name. The redirect worked OK but the site was redirecting these users to www.domain.com/wp-content/w3tc/pgcache/_index.html.gzip instead of www.domain.com for some reason. Clearly a problem with W3 Super Cache plugin conflicting with [...]

How insecure are you really? 3 ways to dramatically increase the security of your online presence

Brendan — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 06:30:32 +0000

How secure are your Facebook, Twitter & Gmail logons? Probably not as secure as you think. If you’re using any of these services over a public network, chances are your logon details are not encrypted. This means if you’re using a shared, public or unencrypted wireless connection, anyone with a free Firefox plugin (Firesheep) can [...]

Contact Form 7 Thank you Page Redirect

Brendan — Fri, 18 Mar 2011 04:27:10 +0000

If you’re using Contact Form 7 and have upgraded to WordPress 3.x the redirect code in the additional settings box seems to have changed. After upgrading the plugin to the latest version, I’m using the code below which is now working fine (guessing it doesn’t work versions older than WP 3.0) Here’s the code – [...]

Cheaper, Fast, Easier & Measureable: 5 alternatives to yellow book advertising

Brendan — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 22:42:02 +0000

Wow, huge response via email to the last post “Yellowpages is dead” and a lot of questions from visitors to the site so we thought we’d put this quick post together for small business owners. Here’s 5 ways to market your small business online that are cheaper, faster, easier and more effective than yellowbook print [...]

Yellowpages in Australia is dead

Brendan — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 23:16:35 +0000

Yellowpages is dead. Ask yourself, when was the last time you actually opened a Yellow Pages phone book to find a business? Now, how many times in the last week have you used Google? …beaten by Google, Facebook and Bing Yellow Pages & Sensis business model is dead – they didn’t move quickly enough to [...]

Facebook for Business? Not sure if its for you?

Brendan — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 06:03:29 +0000

Not sure if Facebook is for your business? One of our clients is absolutely crushing it with Facebook – check out this revenue stat for the last 20 days, amazing! More than $10000 of revenue through their online store from Facebook alone. Convinced yet?

iFrames not working in Joomla CMS? Here’s the fix

Brendan — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:04:31 +0000

If you’re having trouble embedding iFrames into Joomla and the WYSIWYG editor is stripping them out, here’s the fix courtesy of Stack Overflow **** I ran into the same problem when trying to embed Google map widgets into articles. The solution that I found was to do the following: In Article Preferences (Content->Article Manager->Parameters), under [...]

Need more Hits? Google Adwords & SEO is your answer

Brendan — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 21:34:29 +0000

Learn more about our Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) & Google Adwords services Adwords & SEO – what’s the difference? SEO – Search Engine Optimisation SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is the process of getting more traffic to your website by getting the site listed and ranked highly for queries relating to your [...]

Achieve More Online: Are you using your website effectively?

Brendan — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 05:07:39 +0000

Website & Internet Marketing Workshops & Training for Small Businesses Achieve More Online All smart business owners know that the internet provides a huge opportunity to reach new markets, attract more customers and ultimately increase sales. However, the problem is many business owners have spent thousands on a website, yet still fail to attract more [...]

Why I’m mad for Facebook Ads

Brendan — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 07:54:14 +0000

Image via Wikipedia I’ve been banging on about Facebook Ads to my clients for the last six months and brought this up for the first time in our Achieve More Online workshop last week in Joondalup, Western Australia (Perth). I’m super bullish on Facebook advertising particularly for businesses who are already doing TV, magazine, print, [...]

Google Maps Review: get involved in the conversation

Brendan — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 09:46:26 +0000

This week Google unleashed another fantastic feature to really help small business owners further leverage their Google Maps (aka Places aka Local Business Centre) listing. You can now respond directly to reviews (positive or negative) on your Google Maps listing. A big deal – the ability to respond to positive AND negative feedback This is [...]

Unprecedented online marketing opportunity

Brendan — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 12:29:29 +0000

Imagine if 25% of all the world’s internet users went to one website. Imagine if it was dirt cheap to advertise and you could advertise on that site for only a few hundred dollars a month? Well, that website does exist and it is dirt cheap to advertise on it and what’s even better is [...]

Myth:It costs too much to hire an SEO or Adwords professional

Brendan — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 11:46:20 +0000

I recently spoke with a small business owner who told me they didn’t want to pay someone to do SEO & Adwords for them as they didn’t know what they’d get and they thought it was too expensive anyway. I can understand that, both SEO and Adwords can be very difficult concepts to grasp. When [...]

Cheap website hosting:What does it really cost you?

Brendan — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 14:28:36 +0000

Great blog short blog article here from Fitzy at The Frontier Group about the value of a good website hosting provider and plan This is a really important area of your online marketing strategy that is largely neglected and just an after-thought for most people. A lot of small business owners shop around hard when [...]

Facebook for small businesses

Brendan — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 12:38:10 +0000

Image via Wikipedia Here’s a great article about leveraging Social Media & Facebook in Business from Flyingsolo.com.au It gives you a simple blueprint to make Social Media work for your business. Social Media is not for every business It’s important to remember when looking at these things that having a business presence on a social [...]

What gets measured gets managed!

Brendan — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 03:05:39 +0000

Really enjoying meeting business owners in Perth & country WA as part of our Achieve More Online seminars. I can’t go on about this enough – “what gets measured gets managed”. It’s important you use analytics tools on your site to ensure you know how you and the site are actually performing. One great advantage [...]

I’ve been to the workshops, now what?

Brendan — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 11:36:15 +0000

We've been overwhelmed by the positive feedback from the Achieve More Online workshops this week. A lot of business owners who attended left the workshops feeling a little overloaded and wondering where to actually start. So, we'd thought we put up this post to give start you off in the right direction.

Achieve More Online workshops…

Brendan — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 11:00:14 +0000

A great first week of the Achieve More Online workshops. Here’s a quick look at some of the things we covered this week. If you’re interested in coming, head over to the signup page – we’ll be in Mandurah & Perth this coming week.

7 common online marketing mistakes you should stop making right now!

Brendan — Mon, 03 May 2010 07:02:49 +0000

Here’s some really common online marketing & SEO mistakes that business owners make all the time and is why you should use professionals where you can afford it. Mistakes like these cost your business customers! How many of these mistakes are you making? 1. Spending too much time looking at competitor websites and no time [...]

Why has online marketing become so important for business? Especially small businesses?

Brendan — Sat, 01 May 2010 06:38:42 +0000

Marketing your business online is important now more than ever, in particular, local search optimisation. What this means is making sure your business ranks well in search engine results pages (SERPs) for search terms relating to your business AND your location. Why’s that? Because YellowPages is dead! How many people do you know that have [...]

Only 27% of Australian Small Businesses have a website!

Brendan — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 12:00:56 +0000

What! This is a staggering statistic. When was the last time you needed something and where did you search? Yep, I’m guessing you said the Internet! If you’re in business today, a website is simply not an option, its a necessity. If you are one of the 27% of business owners with a website, what [...]

“Eighty percent of success is showing up” – Why SEO should be important to you…

Brendan — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:52:30 +0000

I love this quote from Woody Allen: “Eighty percent of success is showing up”. So many small businesses get sucked into the old “I need a fancy website mindset” which is completely wrong. At the end of the day, what you really want is the result a website can bring, more leads, more enquiries, more sales, [...]

Set an Out of Office reply or Vacation Responder in Google Apps email

Brendan — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 01:14:24 +0000

Here’s how you setup an Out of Office reply in your Google Apps email hosting: Login to your webmail (either goto webmail.youdomain.com or http://google.com/a/yourdomain.com) Click on the wheel/cog in the right hand corner of the screen and goto Mail Settings Click the ‘General’ tab on the new screen that appears. Scroll down to the Out [...]

Success Story: Online Didgeridoo Store

Brendan — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 05:44:52 +0000

Learn about how we’ve helped Didgeridoo Breath build their online presence Didgeridoobreath.com – ranks number 1 in Google for “Didgeridoo Perth” plus hundreds of other search terms Didgeridoo Breath is a Fremantle based Didgeridoo store that has both a retail store and an online store that ships didgeridoos and other related musical instruments worldwide. As [...]