Pin Digital Blog

As a designer im sure you can imagine how hard it can be keeping everything in line at times!  What I mean when I say that is this!  You've been asked to do some concept visuals for a client and in your creative moment your throwing images, text, vector shapes and all sorts together to try and pull in something and give that boring old clients website a lease of life!  Then after you have created a concept visual you all agree on and it gets the final sign off from the client – its game on for the pixel police... Its in this small space between design and 'techy' ('tech... [More]

How to Use Google Analytics to Plan your Online Marketing StrategyI really like Google Analytics, yes it does have its flaws and yes sometimes I get very frustrated when it doesn’t work properly.  However it’s an excellent, free tool which is easy to setup and does exactly what its meant to – provide you with information on what people are doing on your website.  We use it a lot at Pin Digital and I’ve been looking at it even more lately as a result of passing my Google Analytics exam (sorry had to get that in!) and discovering loads of new things and tweaks y... [More]

As well as being a designer I have a healthy appreciation and love of music and still actively DJ a couple of different styles.  For me, working and music are inextricably linked, silence isn’t a preferred option. What I have noticed is how different types of music affect the speed with which you work and how different music is better for different types of work. Although my main djing genre is indie music I find that when I need to design something from scratch and really focus in on the detail that electronic music especially the cinematic electronica of Amon Tobin, Boards of C... [More]

The Online Marketing team at Pin Digital are now qualified in Google AdWords and MSN adExcellence.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with these programs, they are the Pay per Click platforms for Google and MSN (now Bing).  Both platforms operate on an auction system whereby you bid on target keywords.  Your bid will reflect (along with other quality factors) where in the Google and Bing search results you appear for that keyword.  There is potentially a lot of traffic and revenue to be gained from running campaigns on Google and Bing.   Tracey and myself took ... [More]

I'm sure many of you out there who are Google AdWords users will have been using the new user interface over the last few months.  We started to see the new interface being beta tested on client accounts before it slowly got rolled out to more people.  I hate to say it but I'm not a massive fan of the new system.  At first it was very impressive, I generally found it easier to find and sort data how I wanted it.  It was a little clunky and slow but I could accept this as it was a new feature being tested so there were going to be a few bugs.  However several months on ... [More]

So I was sitting in the office a few days ago and I saw a reference to Search Engine Ranking factors created and published by SEOmoz.  It was one of the first documents I read when I joined Pin Digital and I think its a must read for anyone who works in search marketing.Anyway, this reference made me quickly open a spreadsheet a start to list what factors I believed played a part in the Google Search Algorithm.  I just listed them as quickly as I could, then kept it open in the background as I did some client work.  I flicked back every so often to add more ideas to the list.&nb... [More]

I was fortunate enough to be allowed to leave the office for a day and go down to London for SMX London 2009.  Looking at the lineup and the topics covered, I knew this was going to be a good conference and hopefully one where I could take away some ideas for client websites.  I attended the second day which covered mainly organic SEO subjects. It was a great conference and all of the presentations I attended were well worth it, I've decided to write a summary of the conference and expand a little on some of the ideas that came out of the day. Blow your Mind Link Building Technique... [More]