Ok, I thought I would write about this topic because I’ve just had to spend the last 40 minutes clearing my inbox of spam. I decided to enable comments on my WordPress blog in order to stir up some debate and interact with some of my peers on various topics. This has worked particularly well on my blog regarding business web design and WordPress’s role.

However, it has also provided spammers with an opportunity to spam my blog. The picture that you can see associated with this blog is actually a screenshot of my WordPress admin panels comments inbox. This is an illustration of where your money goes if you pay for links. Do not take short cuts, instead try and follow some of the link building procedures that I have covered in my previous blog posts.

Not only is it unlikely that your links will ever see the light of day, as no decent blogger is ever going to approve spam. I always make sure to mark it as spam rather than just putting it in the trash. If your comment is approved by a blogger, you will generally find your comments are grouped in with other links that are often frowned upon my Google such as pornography and gambling. Believe me, you do not want Google to link your sites to any sites in these categories, it will not work in your favour.

I thought I’d take some time out to talk about viral video marketing as I am currently tasked with creating a series of viral videos to upload to YouTube for NightInc.com. The power of social media is massive and making something aching at can achieve 100,000 views on YouTube is not going to be achieved by just sticking a good quality video on YouTube and hoping to get lucky.

So what do you need to do? How do you make it happen? Well, first off you need to make sure your video is good quality. That means it needs to be filmed in high resolution, no one will share a video that’s hard on the eye. You also need to make sure that your brand is present, so that the video becomes synonymous with your brand. Brand identity is highly important in our business web design projects and we make sure that brand identity is established by making logos a focal point of the website and making sure the colour scheme matches the branding. We do the same when putting together viral videos. What’s the point in making a viral video if nobody knows who made it, or knows what you’re trying to sell.

So how do you get your brand across in the video? Well you could stick a logo in the top corner of the screen so it is visible all the way through, but people are generally less inclined to share videos that they believe to contain heavy advertising. Instead, it’s better to flash your logo at the end with a slogan.

The content also needs to be highly relevant to your brand or product. There is no point in making a viral video involving cats when trying to advertise dog food. Do not make a video that doesn’t make sense or fit in with your brand. As I mentioned earlier I’m currently working on an idea for NightInc. NightInc is a website and app that allows users to compare nightclubs and current promotions. In order to make a viral video, it was necessary to use a nightclub as a setting in order to fit in with the product and brand. Most people will share a video that they find funny, and the least expected things are often the funniest. So the idea behind the video is to have the queen dancing in a nightclub with the slogan “everybody’s using it.”

This idea incorporated the major ingredients needed to make a viral video: it fits in with the product/brand and is designed to make people laugh. The only thing left to do is to market it. As I mentioned earlier, you can’t just stick a video online and hope that it gets 100,000 views. You need to share it on social networks and blogs. You need to stir up debate and get people talking about it.

So to summarise, to make a viral video, you need to have a funny idea that fits in with your product/brand and the dedication to promote it all over the Internet using blogs and social media.

Google Plus is becoming increasingly important in SEO. A recent study showed that having a large following on Google Plus could increase your position in the SERPs by up to 14 places! The problem is, not many people know how to use Google Plus.

You can create a Google Plus business page with as much ease as you can a Facebook page. Simply navigate to plus.google.com and click create a new account. If you already have a Google account you can login and go from there. What you need to add to your account are the essentials: a link to your website (we all now know the importance of a back link), a logo (for brand identity purposes), your address (so people can find you) and a full introduction (to stuff some keywords).

Make sure you do everything you can in your power to promote this newly created business page, as it is going to pay an increasingly important part in SEO. For that reason, I will now ask you to just go on over to Google Plus and kindly add Pixem Media to your Circle, the specialists in business website design .

Says it all really…

Branding is an essential part of our commercial world. Establishing brand identity is everything. Most people know that a yellow M usually stands for Mcdonalds and football fans often think of Manchester United when they see the colour red. Increasing brand awareness will increase sales, and in business, sales are important, sales mean money and that means being able to take care of your family.

Brand identity is a massively important part of business website design. Whenever we come across a business web design project here at Pixem, we make sure that the website is totally in sync with the branding. We usually like to go with a logo displayed in the top left corner of our clients website, as people read left to right, top to bottom, so this is the first and most important thing they see.

Nothing gets my back up more than when I am surfing the net and come across a business web design project that doesn’t colour match its text or background colours to its logo. How hard is it to drag up an image of the company’s logo and colour match it on Photoshop? Not very.

Getting colours right on a website is everything. You don’t want to make it too over powering but at the same time you want the site to fit right with the branding.

Remember, in business web design, or just web design in general: identity is everything.