Sam Goddard to Feature in The Net Effect Magazine

Samuel Goddard, Senior Consultant at St James Systems is to be featured in The Net Effect magazine. The magazine's communicaitons team singled out the contributions of St James Systems and the company's online success as well as its novel Internet marketing techniques.

The Net Effect is a publication that has a worldwide readership of 18,000 Internet Marketing professionals.

The Heckington Show - Contract Won

St James Systems are proud to announce that they have won the contract for the redevelopment of the Heckington Show website.

The Heckington Show is the largest village show in England and attracts 30,000 visitors per annum: It has been running since the 1860s and boasts many truly startling stories. For example, the world's first bike race was held at the show and it is now the home of the world's oldest cycle race.

The show is a quintessentially English affair, a weekend in the sun enjoying truly English pursuits and having a great time with a uniquely friendly and helpful community and St James Systems are proud to be involved.

The mockup of the new site can be seen in the portfolio album on our Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/St-James-Systems/20350889982

Website Promotion

Who do you know who has a website on the Internet that sells products?

Who do you know who wants a website that sells products?

St James Systems are looking to get in touch with companies who are interested in making the Internet work for them and who want to make more money and find more customers than ever before.

Our Internet marketing and search engine optimisation programmes have increased our clients income substantially.

Our results:

We have increased the turnover of one of our clients by 9 times within four months

We have increased the number of people visiting our clients' websites by up to 10 times

We have a number of means of working with clients including:
Building, marketing and managing a client's website from scratch
Working with existing websites
Working for a fixed fee or for a commission

If you know anyone who might like to increase their website traffic and turnover, please refer them to us and we will be happy to help.

We include one such letter below:

Having dabbled with Search Engine Optimisation techniques ourselves over the past year and to no great avail, we finally decided to hire the services of St James Systems. Soon after, a report was produced along with a list of suggested improvements that could help our e-commerce site increase targeted traffic and, more importantly, turnover.

Over a period of just 2 months, our turnover has increased from just £350 a month to £1800. In that time we have been introduced to a variety of exciting Search Engine Optimisation techniques. We have worked closely with Sam at St James Systems to improve our website, not only improving its search engine ranking, but also focusing on the customer experience and usability issues.

Our visits have increased from 289 in June to 1,061 in August. St James Systems really do seem to have the 'black art' of Search Engine Optimisation sewn up, and we look forward to working with them over the next few months to further increase the success of our store.

Richard Lang
Digital Design Manager
Tintisha Technologies
www.tintisha.com

Facebook - Are you a fan?

St James Systems are one of only a handful of firms around the world whose search engine optimisation and Internet marketing is focused on social networks. These social networks like Facebook & LinkedIn attract millions of loyal users every day. Facebook has over 100 million daily users, many of whom use their network of friends and contacts to find the products and services they are looking for rather than the search engines.

St James Systems recognise that the perception is that these social network groups are a colossal waste of time but the number of people who use them every day eclipses the number of people who use the search engines. The next person to find your website is far more likely to do so through social media than through the search engines and there are not many people who are making the most of this opportunity.

If you are a user of Facebook, why not come along and take a look at the St James Systems Facebook Page?

A Facebook page is a very simple means of interacting with your clients, fans and potential customers, of getting their feedback and of entering into a conversation with the people who are most likely to buy your products and services. Fans of your Facebook page will get updates of your latest news and additions and you will be able to build relationships with your customers quicker and more cheaply than ever.

If you are looking to build up strong relations with customers, Facebook can be a dream come true.

Would you like a Facebook page for your business? If so, please get in touch with us and we will be happy to help.

Saving Time

Recently, we uncovered a shocking statistic:

The average parent spends twice as long with their email as they do with their own children.

Let's give you an example of how you might be losing time and not realising it.

If opening an email using a keyboard takes 3 seconds (Press CTRL+O) and closing takes the same amount of time (ALT+F4 - go on, try it!) then opening an email by taking your hands away from the keyboard, moving the mouse, clicking, and then putting your hands back on the keyboard might take 15 seconds. The difference is 12 seconds. If you have to open & close 100 emails a day & create & send 50 emails a day, then 12 seconds * 300 clicks = 1 hour.

There is potentially one hour you could be saving a day just by learning how to use your computer more effectively.

We have been musing on these statistics and have been working on a solution. What we have come up with is twofold. Firstly, we are offering free cheat sheets for Windows - lists of shortcuts that save you time & effort. Please contact us for a copy. Secondly, we are offering some touch-typing software for £35+VAT. Let's look at another example.

Yesterday, I wrote 5,000 words worth of reports and articles.

At 30 words per minute this would have taken me 2h 47 minutes.

At 60 words per minute this would take 1h 13 minutes.
If I spent an hour each evening for two weeks using some touch-typing software and increased my typing speed from 30 - 60 words per minute (it is possible) then:

I'd be able to gain the time I spent learning within 10 days.

I'd save myself an hour and a half per day from then on.

At £35+VAT, this software is cheaper than a secretary and it helps with matters that secretaries can't deal with (emails, personal matters, etc).

We hope that this article is of interest to you. If you are finding that your knowledge of Windows shortcuts and your touch-typing ability is constraining you, then please ask for a free cheat sheet and let us provide you with some inexpensive touch-typing software that will help you to type quickly, in an entertaining way and at your own pace.

Microsoft's Non-advertising Advertising with Jerry Seinfeld

In an attempt to distance themselves form almost everyting, Microsoft have released an advert featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. The advert is like the Seinfeld observation about the advert for Dockers that didn't mention the product.

The advert does not mention any of Microsoft's products and features a rather wooden Bill Gates. That Bill Gates is prepared to appear in a rather wooden fashion looking rather geekish is something but otherwise the advert is completely pointless.

Whereas pointlessness was the point of the Seinfeld comedy series, Microsoft is facing stiffer and stiffer competition and, despite its near monopoly is having a job justifying its operating systems and office suites in a time of increased possibilites made through the web.

Apple has done a good job of beginning to take back market share form Microsoft in recent years. As their handheld devices work and work well, so the public's trust in the Apple brand increases. Likewise, Google is muscling in on Microsoft's turf with a new free browser. Furthermore, Linux is becoming more important as an operating system platform.

In short, Microsoft's market is being eroded and the need for packaged software products are dwindling in an age where more and more applications are web based and Microsoft has a shrinking share of the web.

With this in mind, does a quirky, pointless advert just make Microsoft appear quirky & pointless?

What do you think?

Google's Real Problems

As search engine optimisers, we get the impression that a search engine's biggest nightmare is the work we carry out. Not only is this egotistical but it is also untrue. Most optimisers try to give the sites they work with the best possible rankings for what they have and, in so doing, help to show the sites that are serious about their web presence, and make sites more accessible to the search engines and to people with all abilities and disabilities.

'Black Hat' search engine marketers might cause Google to miss a step occasionally as they find ways to fool the search engines but these efforts are short-lived and the brainpower of Google's 100 Doctors of Philosophy are either a step ahead or ready to react quickly.

In truth, Google's problems are much more mundane than industrial espionage or seditious optimisation practices: the main problem is that of scale.

Scale has been a constraint for all kinds of organisations and empires throughout time - the Romans were hampered by their limited mathematical abilities and could not grow beyond the limits of around 100AD and the British Empire found itself becoming the world's policeman, a title that came at a tremendous cost. Likewise, Google's size gives it tremendous problems. Here are a few that you may not have considered.

Breakdowns: It is estimated that Google runs 500,000 servers. At any one time there are going to be several machines that have gone down. Mechanical problems mount up and even if 1 in 1000 servers fails completely in a given year, that's 500 to be changed. With our experience with computers, things go wrong all the time & Google might expect 1000 servers to be down at any one time.

Power: Google has 3 main datacentres, each of which chew through power at around $5000 per hour. Such massive power usage causes massive headaches. Google has recently invested in solar power and put time & money into RE

Revenues: Furthermore, search is a costly area with an estimated 85% of searches being non-commercial and thus difficult to wrap advertising around. Google only has one tried-and-tested means of making money - advertising. But for that, they do not have a business. With the advent of social networking sites like Facebook, with the rise of other media like Video, more and more people are interacting with the Internet without needing search engines; they can get their information and products by interacting with friends rather than by asking a search engine a limited or clunky question. Google has to try hard to preserve its revenue stream - it has grown fat on search revenues and shareholders will demand that they continue to grow and do not get syphoned off by other Internet companies.

Costs: There are massive costs involved in search. Apart from the employment costs (of Google's 100+ doctorates), the costs of machinery, power and research are limiting.

Data: Google's index has grown to 20 billion pages, a gigantic amount. It takes 6 weeks for them to index the sites on the Internet. This amount of data, however, is dwarfed by the 1 trillion pages that they know about. If your dataset is 2% of the data that is on the Internet then you have to ber VERY good at indexing the right data or else searchers will go elsewhere. Google has to be sure that it provides the results that people will find useful very quickly or else users will go elsewhere - too much information and there will be spam and drivel in the index and too little and searchers will miss out on the Internet's variety.

Furthermore, the Internet is growing massively. With Web 2.0 applications like blogs that allow people to quickly & easily publish their information on the Internet (this blog is just one example), the Internet has grown exponentially. Around 140 million people were online in 1998 when Google Inc started compared to 1.4 billion today according to internetworldstats.com and all of them have access to publishing tools that were not available 2 or 3 years ago. There is the problem that the amound of information online might grow in excess of Moore's Law (the rule of thumb used by the founder of Intel in 1965 which basically stated that the number of transistors on an integrated surface doubles every 18 months). This means that if the amount of information on the Internet doubles in less than 18 months, Google either takes longer to compile and analyse the data or it must invest in more & more computing power.

Even more troubling is the problem of infinite scalability. I do not know the limits of technology but there must be significant software problems in co-ordinating the data on 500,000 servers and there must be a limit to the complexity of such a system. With a rapidly growing dataset with which to compute, Google is at the limits of the possible as far as computing is concerned.

These problems of scale mean that Google spends more and more time and money worrying about physical constraints than about giving the best search results that get the most advertising revenues. Will the company be able to continue to grow beyond these constraints and keep searchers & shareholders happy? Will they be able to continue to try to take market share from companies like Microsoft on browsers that do not earn them any money? Time will tell.

Thanks to Leslie Rhode & Andy Edmonds for their opinions.