The campaign has been recognised in the ‘Best use of Search – Retail’ category in the European Search Marketing Awards 2012.

The awards will be presented at an awards dinner at the NH Barbizon Palace, in Amsterdam on the evening of Thursday 5 July 2012. All the team have got their fingers crossed for yet another business award for the company. Watch this space as soon we will be showcasing our results with the Case Study that gained us our nomination. Equally, Google are in the process of developing their own Case Study from the campaign to help promote Adwords!

Promotion of the 2012 Nominations Campaign has started already, with an exciting Facebook Competition. The Teaching Awards are giving away a Sony Vita to one lucky winner and two runner up prizes of the latest iPod Touch! This is open to all Facebook users – Click here to enter!

This is the first of many exciting campaigns for the Teaching Awards 2012. Watch this space!

For more information on Facebook Competitions, give us a call today on 0845 257 1225

Mark Zuckerberg and his team are looking to tackle a growing issue, that an average of 18 people die every day waiting for an organ transplant. With an impressive 901 million users, the Facebook team are hoping to spread awareness within the Social Network and encourage people to sign up to the organ donor registry.

Links to the UK and US organ donor site are already available on the social media site and more are expected to follow.

The movement has received some mixed reviews, though a majority has been very positive. The NHS Blood and Transplant is already promoting the new Timeline option through their Facebook page, take a look here > > NHS Organ Donation Facebook Page, and don’t forget to post on your Timeline if you’re a registered donor!

Source: Facebook, Mashable

Froehling Clinic are a multi-disciplinary medical specialist for diagnosis, treatment and prevention of back and neck pain and have clinics in Nantwich and Salford Quays.

Marcus Froehling (Froehling Clinic’s founder) said “Great team, great design and great functionality, I can only commend Clicky Media™ and have recommended them to friends and business partners already”

We are delighted with the results and are looking forward to our continued working relationship. See the site here >>

A&A Self Storage have worked with us for a number of years and this is the 2nd incarnation of their website!  We also provide a range of digital marketing services to A&A Self Storage including SEO, PPC Management and Display Advertising.

A&A Self Storage have 3 stores based in and around Greater London and provide a superb service – take a look at their new site here >>

With over 901 million users worldwide, Facebook continues to dominate the social networking world.

Below are the current statistics and demographic breakdowns for Facebook usage in the UK only.

(Data accurate as of 26th April 2012 – Source Facebook.com)

Total Facebook Users in the UK

There are a total of 30,595,980 Facebook users in the UK

UK Facebook User Gender Split

There are slightly more women than men using Facebook in UK, but only just!

UK Facebook Age Split

This is the stat that often surprises our clients! Its not just the younger generations using Facebook!

Here at Clicky Media™, we offer a great range of Facebook services that include both Facebook advertising and Facebook Page Design. We also specialise in promoting brands through the social media networks and across the web.

If you want any further information, you can visit our social media marketing section on the Clicky Media™™ website. Alternatively, you can chat with one of our professionals on 0845 257 1225 or email us at info@clickymedia.co.uk.

The Google ‘Over-Optimisation Penalty’ has still so far to be confirmed by Google themselves, but that hasn’t stopped the SEO blogosphere from buzzing with speculation about what will be targeted, whose rankings will suffer and some people even reporting that it might be here already. Certainly there are examples out there of some larger sites dropping twenty or more places overnight.

Amid all the conjecture, there are a few recurring themes. Below, we’ve compiled some of the salient points and how to avoid the pitfalls of ‘over-optimisation’.

Pages Titles

The main things Google might look unfavourably on with page titles are; repeated keywords and repetitious use of synonyms that don’t add anything in the way of understanding.

Keep things simple and clear. Try to include keyword search terms that describe the page overall and the products it features.

Backlinks

Backlinks are a strong indicator to search engines of a site’s relative worth. This knowledge has lead to widespread exploitation, namely; comment spamming, blog networks and reciprocal linking.

Link-building can be a laborious process, there are no quick fixes but links from quality sites can help increase traffic and authority. Its importance should not be underestimated.

Footers

Link-heavy footers were once a neat method of fooling search engines without impacting too much on a site’s appearance. Placing large numbers of links at the bottom of a page was a way to tell Google that it was important and worth looking at.

Use anchor-text links in the body of the onpage text where they enhance the user experience of the site.

Internal Links

Exact-match anchor text repeatedly linking to the same pages on a site might have once helped spread a site’s authority but, when overused, this is little more than extra clutter.

Instead of focusing on sheer volume of internal links; try to include logical, useful links where they are appropriate. Also, change the anchor text to avoid using the same keyword phrases over and over again as repeated uses will not bring extra value.

Keyword Stuffing

Blocks of text written with the sole purpose of housing a few-dozen mentions of a particular keyword or keywords do not add to a site’s value.

Any information on-page should be there for humans, rather than search engines. As such, it should be useful, relevant and well written.

Bearing these things in mind will not only help your site to avoid being penalised by Google, it will also improve the experience for the user, which should always be the priority of SEO!

Google has announced some exciting new changes it will be bringing in for ‘phrase’ and ‘exact’ match keywords.

What does this Mean?

Starting in mid-May, the new matching behaviour will extend ‘phrase’ and ‘exact’ match keywords to recognize plurals, misspellings, accents and abbreviations in an attempt to focus more on what the user is searching for. Even when searching for the same thing, individuals will more often than not use different wording, spellings and terminology. Google aims to focus on what the user is searching for, taking more variations into account to create a better user experience.

Benefits

The early testing conducted by Google has found that the new matching behaviour can increase the number of clicks in a campaign by as much as 3%. Whilst there is still the option to retain the old matching behaviour settings, the new system has had positive feedback so far and looks set to improve clicks across many campaigns.

One important thing to note is that this is optional, so should you wish to stick with the original settings you’ll still have that option.

Source: Adwords

It looks as though it will mean similar tools such as DropBox will struggle to compete.

Find out more here >>

We have been doing some research this week into creating graphics for the new iPad retina display.

Essentially the retina display has a huge pixel density allowing really sharp graphics, the problem is that most 99.9% of website graphics are made for a quarter of the pixel density.

The new iPad (or iPad 3) has a display resolution of 2048 x 1536 and to achieve this each standard pixel size has been divided into 4 parts (see this on Apple’s website for more info – http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/)  The results are simply amazing and the clarity of graphics, photos and text are massively improved over a normal screen.

When looking at a website on the new iPad the text is often very clear but the new pixel density means the graphical elements often look a little blurry due to their lower resolution.

We have noticed this is the case for most websites, however some (such as Apple and Google) have set a Media Query to spot if a user is viewing their website on an iPad 3 and then serve up graphics with twice or four times the pixel density.

We have also done this for our website (but only the logo bar at the top of the page for now) and the results are good – a nice clear logo which only loses clarity if you really zoom in a long way.

So what did we do?

Firstly we needed to redo our logo bar in twice the resolution.  This was quite simple however we needed to re import the high-res graphics to make sure they didn’t blur as we doubled the pixels. (we use Fireworks but Photoshop or similar is fine)

Originally our logo bar at the top of the website was 980 x 95 so we set the canvas size to twice this – so 1960 x 190, then re imported each graphic until it was an exact replica of before but twice the size.

Then we needed to set a Media Query in our CSS to detect if a user is using an iPad 3 and then serve the new high-res graphic if they were – the below works well:

@media only screen and (min-device-width: 1536px) and (max-device-width: 2048px) and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 2) { // your CSS }

And the results?

Its hard to show your the true results unless you are using the new iPad but the image below if clicked shows the new clarity of the logo area (the other images need re-scaling too but hopefully you can see the difference)

This is going to be a lot of work for just a few users?

You might be thinking that there is no way you are going to be resizing every single graphic of your site just for these specific users? Well you are probably right for now, and if you look at Google for example they have only really re-sized their logo and Apple have re-sized a few of their glossy graphics (especially on the iPad section) and their navigation bar.  But if the rumors are true Apple’s next suite of products including the iMac, are likely to come with retina displays so these users are likely to grow very soon.