Merry Christmas!

2008 has been a great year for Mancala. Not only have we moved to our fab new offices at Black Swan Court on Westgate Road, but we have also been lucky enough to meet lots of people at our Internet Marketing and SEO seminars whether at our Newcastle City Centre office, at La Riviera on the Newcastle Quayside or through the Business Link Enterprise Shows.

We're really looking forward to coming back in the new year to get going with our hands-on workshops focusing on SEO Newcastle, Email Marketing, AdWords Campaigns and How to Run a Successful Ecommerce Store from our fabulous Newcastle City Centre offices.

Our Christmas night out on Monday was great fun at Barn Asia in Grainger Town where the Asian fusion food was to die for and Deryck got a wee bit over-excited about the cheese plate (see photo) as I did about the Singha beer that made me wish I was spending Chiristmas in Thailand a la 2002...

So, all that is left to say is that we hope your holiday is a warm and fuzzy one and we look forward to helping you ensure that 2009 is a successful year.

Merry Christmas!
xxx

PS - You can check out our holiday hours here.

Christmas starts here!

We realise that it's Christmas here at Mancala when we can't leave the office because of the height of our to-do pile. It's a cruel joke - we should be eating, drinking and generally being merry (or at least shopping anyway) but December is traditionally our busiest time of year.

So, thank God for Aegis IT whose annual Christmas bash gave us the excuse we needed last night to leave the office and have some fun. Reindeer hats, Play Your Cards Right and Deryck winning the bingo card later and I'm wondering whose turn it is to nip for a skinny latte and bacon sarnie...

Mancala @ The Enterprise Show

Exciting news - I will be presenting two key seminars at the Business Link organised Enterprise show. And Tracy & Gillian will be manning a stand so you can visit us and pick our brains on all thing Internet Marketing. Our seminars will cover Internet Marketing & SEO and are completely free to registered delegates.

The shows are at St James Park, Middlebrough Teaching and Learning Centre, Alnwick Garden and Durham County Cricket Club.

For more information check out our Enterprise Show page of our website.

Goodbye & Good Luck Mark!

On Friday the team headed to our city centre local to send off to Mark who is leaving us for pastures new. A great time was had by all.

Good luck in your new job Mark!

Mancala at play

As promised, here are some pictures from the Aegis IT Bond themed bash last week. I'm particularly impressed with my pictures with the Jaws look-a-like!

I was expecting you Mr. Bond...

Last night all the employees from Mancala had an amazing time at the Bond themed Christmas party held by our clients and fellow residents of Charlotte Square - Aegis IT.

Aegis IT are a team of IT professionals with many years experience in the supply, procurement, implementation and management of IT solutions. Established in 2004 by David McPherson, Aegis IT is Based in North East England with an office in Charlotte Square, Newcastle upon Tyne.

After being welcomed by Bond girls on stilts, confronted with a 007 vodka frozen fountain and playing on the casion all night, as you can imagine we are all feeling a little more than delicate this morning...

Pictures to follow!

Adding New Content to your Website

When was the last time you updated or added new content to your website? Yesterday? Last week? Last Month? NEVER?!

I hope it is not the later, but don't worry if it is you can change that from now.

Search Engine Optimisation Tip - Did you know that many search engines check to see when you last updated your site and use that as a gauge as to whether your site is up to date and relevant - the logic here is that a site that has been update in the last month is going to be more relevant that a site that has not been updated for over a year.

So what to do about this. Well assuming you have access to edit and add content to your website (either via FTP or through a Content Management System) you should go in an make sure that the information on your website is up to date. It is? well start adding some content - Make it a once a week habit (once a day if you can really spare the time).

There is another added bonus of doing this - over time you will be building your website so it could have potentially hundreds of pages of content. Each of these pages is an access point for someone to visit your site via a search engine - the more pages you have then potentially the more Keywords and Phrases you will be targeting - before you know it you will have hundreds, if not thousands of daily visits to your website. What you do with that traffic once it is there is up to you (I'm sure I will cover this in a post some time in the near future).

Here are some tips on what to do if your imagination is struggling to think of how to update your site with new content -

• Create an Articles Section on your website
• Think of 5 articles related to what you do and write them up (try and make the article at least 300 words long if you can).
• You now have 5 weeks worth of updates for your website.
• Keep a notepad handy, when ever you think of a new article title jot it down. You will then start to develop a list for when you can't think of what to write about.
• Keep with it. Short term you will not get much benefit from doing this - 12 months down the line, you will be amazed by the results.

Good luck!