Latest news blog from Local Link Up

Businesses are not ready for mobile

2012-02-21T13:58:00.000Z

Traffic from mobile devices in the UK has increased to about 9% (according to StatCounter) which is also the same percentage of Quantcast’s Top Million sites that are deemed ready for mobile in 2012 according to data from the Mongoose Metrics Data Series.

This compares to the previous year where it was determined that of 7,000 retail websites only 4.8% were mobile ready – a nearly doubling of the Web’s mobile readiness in a year.

In the Mongoose Metrics data set, 118,000 of the 1,000,000 sites could not be crawled at all for a variety of reasons, resulting in approximately 882,000 sites that could be used for this data.

As 79,133 sites either rendered a mobile version on the same URL or redirected to a mobile version of the site under a different URL when a smartphone user agent was detected, this number dropped to 76,241 when a feature phone user agent was used.

Interestingly, these sites used a JavaScript mobile redirect more often for feature phones than smartphones.

Get your business ready for mobile with a Local Link Up mobile ready website. Its less costly than you may think and will bring immediate benefits in search results.

Happy New Year and much e-commerce to come!

2012-01-06T14:57:00.000Z

Well it's the start of another year and at Local Link Up we are as excited as ever about the prospect for what lies ahead.

Our engineers are currently working on a new extension to our website builder that allows customers to advertise their products through various channels such as eBay, Facebook, Amazon, Google Shopping and of course on their own e-commerce platform.

Once launched this product will be available as an add-on to our Pro Design customers and in a limited form to our PLINK Plus PPR customers too.

I will keep you updated.

Take a look at my little one!

2011-12-02T18:08:00.000Z

Well they have done it. Our engineers have managed to complete our fully integrated mobile site builder called MoPD. take a look at our mobile website builder now.

Not only can it construct some great little websites that are optimised to work on Iphone, Android and Blackberry but you log in at any time as the site owner and change any content easily. A first for mobile website builders

Take a look, we think you will be impressed with our little one!

SEO produces more leads than Pay Per Click

2011-11-09T14:37:00.000Z

Search engine optimisation is definitely the number one way to obtain leads for both business to consumer and also business to business marketers, beating both Pay Per Click and social multimedia promotion in a recent study of internet marketers. But more of those surveyed state they want to increase their social media advertising budgets in 2012, before SEO and PPC.

The figures come from the 2011 State of Digital Marketing Report, which was authored by Webmarketing123, a California-based internet marketing company. The company surveyed above 500 U.S. online marketers in August and September.

Strangely as we have already been stating at Local Link Up for some time period, if you would like to get the greatest success from your internet advertising spending budget it needs to be focused on the Search engine optimisation industry however we feel that as real successes are difficult to get and keep track of in this sector businesses basically keep away from doing it when this could easily be a awesome source of fresh clients. Local Link Up is the no worries, no risk Pay Per Rank service. If you would like very good results while not taking risks with your budget in the Search engine optimisation field then there is only one company to call.

.mobi is the future of advertising at Local Link Up

2011-11-04T13:40:00.000Z

Well following substantial demand our engineers are in the process of perfecting an addition to our superb website builder package to allow our customers and designers to produce superb mobile versions of websites and to allow regular updates easily like all Local Link Up products.

In just a few weeks we will be releasing this option to all customers so they can tap in to the lucrative mobile search market which now makes up almost 33% of all search requests.

I will keep you posted.

Have you blogged today? Its easy with Local Link Up

2011-10-17T17:07:00.000+01:00

Blogging has long been seen as a great way to update your website. Most SEO specialists suggest that you regularly write updates to your website in the form of blog posts at least once or twice each week. Google and other search engines look at websites and rank them more highly if their content is often fresh and a simple blog post about your subject matter can have huge benefits to your search engine rankings.

Just like me writing this blog, you too can enhance the content of your website by adding a blog to your website which you can get your website designer to add for you usually for a reasonable cost but did you know that in all Local Link Up websites we have a blog built-n free of charge. You can get blogging right away with no fuss and absolutely no cost. Just log in to your Local Link Up Plink or Pro Design website and click on the blog editor. The rest is easy, just fill in the boxes and your post will go live.

But that's not all, if you choose our Facebook page option, any post you make to your blog will also be updated at the same time to your Facebook page and posted on Twitter to easing the burden of updating multiple important content sources for your business.

Local Link Up makes it easy to be a blogger so why not get started enhancing your content today.

Local Link Up upgrades to Microsoft Exchange Mail for all customers

2011-09-23T14:19:00.001+01:00

As we continue to grow, Local Link Up constantly looks to improve the services we offer to our customers and this week we are going through a huge upgrade program to replace our Linux based mail platform with a Microsoft Exchange platform that will allow our customers to use many more features including calendar features, contacts and push email that will better support the current crop of connected devices such as Ipad's Iphone's Blackberry and Android plus many more.

Its a big job as we have over 30,000 customers to upgrade but we are confident this investment in engineering time will serve our customers better.

Business Advertising Solutions through Local Link Up

2011-09-13T08:42:00.000+01:00

Read a recent review of Local Link Up

Business Advertising Solutions through Local Link Up
The business world has become so competitive that it is almost impossible for new businesses to establish themselves in a well-known market niche. Moreover, advertising campaigns have become more aggressive with most businesses relying on search engine campaigns to get word out to their target audience. However, one of the major risks involved with search engine campaigns is that they often tend to be risky. You may easily spend quite a lot of money on a campaign that does not produce good results as there is no guarantee that your website will ever reach the first page on any of the popular search engine results yet you still pay for the campaign.

However, one of the easiest and completely risk-free business advertising solutions is the Pay Per Result innovation that was pioneered by Local link Up. Local Link Up is a UK-based company that specializes in increasing one’s target market by offering and developing low cost business advertising solutions that are geared towards achieving results for their customers. The PPR innovation is distinctly different from the normal search engine advert campaigns in that you only pay for the keywords chosen only if your website has reached the top page of Google’s search engine.

The PPR SEO integration feature works through a series of simple steps that will allow you to greatly increase your website’s awareness across the internet. A new user to the Local Link Up website gets a new, free Plink Profile built on a web address of their own choice. Moreover, with the PPR option, they also get the opportunity to select numerous key phrases that they would like the Local Link Up website to use so as to carry out the business advertising campaign. The selection of the Key phrases is simply done through a keyword selector tool in which one types in the keywords or phrases that the customers may identify with, as well as the location that is served by the individual’s company. The process ends with the keyword tool generating an automatic quote based on what has been entered.
Tracking the progress of this free business advertising solution is quite easy and is done through the dashboard. This utility also allows for one to monitor their billing and account information.

Lately, a lot of emphasis has been placed on social media marketing and how social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ can help businesses advertise themselves to potential online customers. However, one of the major problems is that it tends to be quite difficult to manage one’s business as well as managing the different social network accounts without a social media specialist. As such, Local link Up developed a new business advertising solution for this particular problem.

The Total Internet Marketing or TIMS solution is a new business advertising feature that allows you to update your audience on the different networks through a single source. This is done through the LLU TIMS control panel in which one can simply perform all their tasks that they would do on a normal social media account such as posting thoughts, adding friends, updating their profile, etc.

In this way local Link Up can then monitor feedback from the different social networks and within a short amount of time, your audience will vastly increase in number. While Local Link Up has a number of free business advertising solutions, there are also numerous benefits to be gained by upgrading and becoming a premium member through the PlinkPlus and Pro Design options. PlinkPlus users get gallery features as well as enhanced company descriptions while some of the noteworthy benefits for the Pro Design option include a custom designed website, domain name registration, as well as gallery features and the existing features of the PlinkPlus option.

Local Link Up continues to grow at an amazing pace

2011-09-10T12:13:00.000+01:00

Local Link Up continues to grow its UK network of small and large business customers who are enjoying our services. To date well over 30,000 businesses have signed up to our free advertising service and over 5000 businesses have then upgraded to our premium Pro Web Design service.

Local Link Up continues to innovate and last week alone 90 businesses signed up to our custom Facebook page design service which gives our customers a fantastic custom page on their Facebook site but then allows them to edit it easily using our Facebook page editor. Our customers feedback is that they are delighted that they can update the page whenever they feel at no cost.

Over 40 year olds are not getting Facebook

2011-08-02T09:38:00.000+01:00

According to a recent report most businesses are missing the opportunity that is Facebook.

Ticketmaster estimates that every time one of their customers posts on Facebook that they’ve purchased a ticket, his or her's friends spend an additional $5.30 on the internet site. When last year’s Google conference was going on, they tweeted on the morning of the convention: “100 tickets remaining, 550 bucks an item, use this marketing code”. 11 minutes later they tweeted, “Sorry they have all gone, thank you.” That’s $55,000 sales with one twitter update in eleven minutes. E-commerce sales are expected to top $1.4 trillion by 2015. And IDC estimates that in 5 years, 10-15 per-cent of total customer spending in the western world may go through web sites for example Facebook.

The problem here is that most of the people running businesses simply dont have a commercial understanding of social media and in particular Facebook and Twitter and the size of the audiences. The over 40's who run businesses are most at risk having left school before the computer became a standard item they have been slow to adopt most web technologies but with social media this has been even more pronounced with business owners really not understanding how important it is to establish their presence and register their Facebook and Twitter ID's. These ID's are being quickly taken up by their younger competitors while they tell everyone who will listen that it is a waste of time to be on Facebook!

What is different about Facebook and Twitter is that their is only one version of a Facebook name so if you want to register your Facebook business name you better be quick. Unlike website domains Facebook and Twitter do not allow trade or resale in registered names. If you miss it then you wont ever get it.

Local Link Up has released a product to address this. It doesnt require any Facebook skills but will provide a solid platform to help your business benefit from the social media revolution.

PLINK gets even more social with Facebook

2011-07-22T14:49:00.000+01:00

Not content with rolling out a brand new video product just a couple of weeks ago our engineers have been busy beavering away with our new Facebook module which allows our customers to get social without the headaches.

Local Link Up will create for our customers who opt for this service a Facebook custom business page and secure their very own Facebook business address for life.

Here is the press release:

LocalLink Up is the social media connector for any business. All businesses know they need to engage with audiences both locally and in a wider market using social media but frankly unless they employ a full time social media specialist they will almost certainly have become overwhelmed by the choices on offer and how they work. Your business should be engaging with Google search, Bing Search, Yahoo Search, Facebook, Twitter Youtube and Google +1 at the very least but finding your way around these networks let alone posting on them is quite simply a nightmare. You wouldnt have time to run your business if you did.

Just two years ago it was hard enough to get a website on Googles first page. It was also expensive but Local Link Up solved that with a low cost Google rankings product that has seen over 20,000 businesses ranking on the first page for a small monthly fee. Now we introduce our social media connector called TIMS - Total Internet Marketing.

TIMS is not just a concept, it is a solution that is managed by Local Link Up for you but allows you to interact with one source, the LLU TIMS control panel and build and update your audience on all of the above social media networks with no skill required and almost none of your precious time.

You get one place to post your thoughts, your latest pictures of a job or perhaps your menu for a restuarant. Its one place where you can manage your friends requests and the results of your campaigns and then Local Link Up sends out your messages to many sources and monitors the feedback.

Most importantly Local Link Up will help you build a network either locally or in a wider area by engaging with the social networks and before you know it you could have an audience of hundreds or thousands or potential customers that you can tell about your latest products or service and before you know it you will be gaining customers and business from social networking like the professionals.

The first stage of TIMS will launch next week with the Facebook connector and will be shortly followed by Twitter and Google +1 connectors.

New PLINK and PLINKEO is live

2011-07-01T12:05:00.000+01:00

Great news, today Local Link Up has released it latest version of the PLINK local advertising product. It features a great new cleaner design and behind the scenes a fantastic new simplified interface for our customers to update their content but thats not all..........

The new plink will form the foundation for a new suite of products that connect users to Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and many more social networking services all from one simple control panel.

Local Link Up on BBC today.

2011-06-30T15:29:00.002+01:00

Today Local Link Up was featured on both the lunchtime and this evenings BBC news and breakfast radio in a feature about the teacher strikes and how it has affected employees in the workplace.

Various Local Link Up employees brought their children in to work today and a BBC film crew filmed a short piece with some of the children and their parents.

The staff at Local Link Up Lancaster office thoroughly enjoyed being part of the action!

New PLINK/PLINKEO editing system

2011-06-26T12:54:00.002+01:00

Great news, along with the new updated PLINK designs and our brand new PLINKEO video product our engineers have designed a new way to interact with your PLINK when editing it that our customers should find easier and more pleasant to use.

The new editing interface should arrive week commencing 27th June 2011.

Coming soon, to a PLINK near you

2011-06-22T12:40:00.000+01:00

Well our engineers have been a bit quiet just lately but in fact they have just been squirreling away in the nerd room to come up with a new improved version of the PLINK to take into account some of our customers feedback about the design of the old PLINK and also to accommodate our new latest secret product, a video PLINK we like to call the PLINKEO!

The new design is cleaner and smarter and tones down some of the Local Link Up branding so our customers potential customers can get right down to the detail and see what services our customers are offering.

If our customer upgrades to our video offering, the PLINKEO then there is a fantastic video plonked right in the top half of the page to greet their potential customers. These video have been engineered to look great but very importantly add to their search engine rankings so that Google and the other major search engines see that our customer is committed to providing top quality information about their business.

Videos also have a dual benefit because in tests having a video on your website massively improves response rates and potential customers understanding of your offering. They are not free but as usually they are great value like everything from Local Link Up. We expect to be able to launch the PLINKEO in the week commencing 27th June 2011 so watch out for it.
All customers will receive a free upgrade to the new PLINK style.

Are you really getting your share of internet business?

2011-05-24T14:04:00.000+01:00

This week, according to Eric Schmidt, the boss of Google, business is booming on the internet but still most businesses are not getting their share.

In 2009 the internet sector made up over £100 billion of business which was 7.2% of GDP. By 2015 that is projected to grow to over 10% in a conservative estimate.

According to Schmidt the UK is the world leader in adopting internet commerce and that is why we are seeing such huge growth. While many aspects of our economy flounder, internet advertising is growing dramatically.

Are you selling your services online, if you are not you are most definitely missing out on substantial potential customers. Local Link Up is a low-cost risk-free way to get your business on the first page of Google.

New Website Coming Soon

2011-05-24T11:26:00.000+01:00

I know it’s not that exciting to most observers really but we are excited about our new website that will launch very soon.

Focusing on our unique free advertising package and offering a free trial of our Pay Per Rank service (PPR), it will allow new customers to understand much more clearly the fantastic benefits of the Local Link Up service.

Often the feedback we have received is that our customers didn’t fully understand all the features of our PLINK business profile and Pro Design websites and the fantastic things they could do with it as well as enjoying the benefits of first page Google rankings. Our new website will help explain the many extra features such as social networking, galleries, blogs, news and friend connectors and much more.

There is a lot in the Local Link Up service that our customers simply don’t realise is part of the offering. We hope after our website refresh this will become much clearer.

Network Outages resolved

2011-05-20T13:50:00.000+01:00

Dear customers

Further to my previous post our engineers are fairly certain that they have isolated and resolved the network problem that has affected some of our customers. We have seen no reported problems in the past 36 hours. We are monitoring the situation but hope that is the end of the problem. If anyone has issues logging on to their PLINK or Pro Design websites please contact our UK support team on 01524 230250.

Network Outages during the past 48 hours

2011-05-18T19:32:00.000+01:00

During the last 48 hours Local Link Up has been experiencing intermittent short network outages and one longer period of up to two hours this afternoon. Our engineers are working to isolate the problem and we offer our sincere apologies to anyone affected.

We believe at this time that the problem is with a faulty piece of equipment which has been replaced and is now functioning normally however we cannot be sure of the fix until the network is under heavy load during busy periods in the daytime.

I can assure you that we really care about uptime and Local Link Up has had almost 100% network continuity during the past two years. We will continue to look for improvements in reliability once this current issue is closed.

Once again we offer our apologies for the customers who were affected.

Why your domain name matters

2011-05-16T14:30:00.000+01:00

Commonly we find businesses that have websites with their own company name as their website address telling us that they dont get the rankings they expect despite their site being heavily optimised and fit for purpose. One of the simplest pieces of advice we give them is to register and build a site on a generic domain name. Put simply a generic domain name reflects the main service your offer for example "plumber Carlisle".

What impact does having a name versus generic domain name have on where your site will rank?

Here are some thoughts from our SEO team

Your domain name is one of many rankings factors that make up where Google and other search engines list your site. Having a generic domain name is a sure fire way to gain some extra points when the search engines come looking at your site.

For instance:

Keyword for ranking is “plumber carlisle”

Company 1's domain name http://joebloggsandco.com

Company 2's domain name http://plumber-carlisle.co.uk

Company 1 uses its own company name for the website, and has been there for several years but just doesnt get the rankings they expect. Now look at Company 2 – it has the perfect domain in that the keyword and domain name are the same.

Company 2’s domain name will almost certainly rank on page much higher that company 1, and probably first page ranking assuming other variables are in place such as a well written site with good fresh content. Company 1 will have to do a lot more work to make sure the search engine algorithm knows what the site is about and to make it see it is relevant and important enough to get top page rankings for the keyword term.

Article about the importance of SEO from the Sunday Times

2011-05-10T17:38:00.000+01:00

Reproduced from the Sunday Times

Christina Lundberg and Rustan Panday are using a bed of nails to drive customers to their website selling acupressure mats. Every time someone types the phrase into a Google search it brings up the pair’s website, bedofnails.org, at the top of the results page.

While the £44 mats — which bring relief to sufferers of back pain and insomnia — are also stocked in Harvey Nichols and Fenwick department stores, online customers now account for 40% of Lundberg and Panday’s sales.

“The business is really taking off now,” said Lundberg, 28. Their two-year-old venture’s success is largely thanks to search engine optimisation (SEO) — making sure that Google lists a website on its first page of results once the keywords are typed in. It’s the holy grail of merchants.

There is no point in creating a fantastic website selling wonderful products if nobody can find it. With more than 250m websites worldwide, even the smallest business needs to take on SEO to stand a chance of being noticed.

After all, websites that appear in the top three places of a search engine’s results attract 98% of all traffic on the web, statistics show. The website in first place takes 60%. People very rarely look at the second results page or beyond.
Quite how Google arrives at its list of most relevant sites is top secret, based on algorithms that are constantly being tweaked. But at its simplest, relevancy is determined by content and by the number of sites that link to yours.

“SEO is about reverse engineering to try to trick Google into thinking you are the most relevant site,” said Aneesh Varma, the co-founder of FabriQate, a creative digital agency in west London. “Anybody can launch a website and the barriers to entry are low, so if your business relies on the web for customers you need to be proactive.”

So how do you go about it? First, give your website — and by extension your business — a name that describes what it does. If your business sells cupcakes, then giving it the website address cupcakes.com will encourage Google to rate it more highly — and make it easier for potential customers to find — than calling it yummythings.com. Even better, call it Janescupcakes.com, because then you are creating a brand too.

Second, include the words and phrases you wish to be known for into the content of your website, as many times as you can. Then incorporate meta tags into the html code of your website. Meta tags are information that you can write into the unseen instruction part of your website and are recognised by Google and other search engines as they trawl the internet looking for relevant sites.

Third, get other well-regarded sites to mention your site and include a link to it — the simplest place to start is to create a Facebook page and Twitter account for your business that link to your site. Links from a trade organisation or local community website are useful too. You might also be able to get a blogger to link to your site — perhaps by sending them some products to review — and you should definitely write a regular blog on your website, which people can follow and link to.

Local Link Up can take the pain and risk out of getting a site on the first page of Google. Local Link Up offer a no results, no payment service called PPR (Pay Per Rank)which means that unless your site gets found on the first page of Google for your chosen phrases you pay nothing.

Online advertising in the US topped $26 billion last year.

2011-04-15T15:16:00.000+01:00

IAB: 2010 Online Advertising Worth $26 Billion in the US. UK markets follow.

The IAB released its yearly figures for 2010 online advertising report this morning. Search marketing constituted the largest category share of the $26 billion online ad spend, at 46 percent.

This year also marks the first time that the IAB and its partner PriceWaterhouseCoopers are estimating mobile ad revenues. They put US mobile ad revenues at between $550–$650 million in 2010.

Local Link Up is a market leader in the UK market and is the only Pay Per Rank or pay for results service in Europe. Why does Local Link Up only charge our customers when we get results? Because we know we get results!

Facebook integration at Local Link Up

2011-03-29T18:45:00.001+01:00

Today we have added the Facebook "like" button to all our PLINK profile websites. This gives our customers another way to promote their sites and provides extra sources of traffic.

Watch out for even more Facebook and Twitter integration in the next few weeks.

Its all in the free results

2011-03-11T14:17:00.000Z

Well it’s not something that is new news but I was reading a report today from User Centric that confirms with eye tracking that 80% of users on average do not look at the paid advertisements on Google or Bing. In fact this news has been around for years and was one of the inspirations for the Local Link Up product set. All our packages include an advertising element that specifically targets the natural listings because that is where the business is for our customers.

Local Link Up is an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) service that is designed to get your business found on the search engines. All our products and packages have one thing in mind and that is to make websites that are targeted at getting results. There are far too many services out that that produce shiny websites that don’t perform. At Local Link Up we make sure that your website does get ranked and we are the only company in Europe that ties our success to yours, in that we don’t charge you for your listings if you don’t get found on Google, the world’s largest source of business! Don’t be fooled by packages that promise to deliver after you have paid vast sums of money. Take the Local Link Up approach and only pay when you get results. Pay Per Rank SEO is the only option to trust.

Upgrading sites to our new sitebuilder package

2011-02-18T15:02:00.000Z

We are currently going through a process of upgrading all our existing customers free of charge to use our new site builder software package. As always we try to offer the best possible service to all our customers.

If your site has not yet been upgraded it will be during the next few weeks!