Myk Baxter Marketing offers online marketing, web design & development solutions that are backed by innovation and creativity. We help you craft your brand identity and create an impacting online presence. Making websites work is about understanding what your visitors need and then taking that information, adding ingenuity in design and cutting-edge technology to create scalable websites that can generate ROI through our proven SEO, Social Media & Online Marketing Solutions. Not just any old online marketing consultant.
Every web design that has been conceptualized and developed by Myk Baxter Marketing is choc-a-bloc with new ideas, innovative solutions and backed by technology. We shine the spotlight on your business and dress it up in such a unique way that no one can give it a miss. And once our stunning designs have caught the attention of the viewe
We build interest with the most relevant and optimized content. We offer services like:
A methodical approach, a targeted view, a fresh perspective, an innovative bent of mind, a creative streak, an inclination to excel and serve our customers better, is what makes Myk Baxter Marketing different. We are a company that you can rely on for all your web designing and online marketing needs. We get the deepest insight into your business and then create a website that will match your online objectives.
Our strong understanding of SEO Marketing gives us the ability to make optimum use of organic SEO strategies and take your website from the lowest rung of the ranking ladder to the topmost one. The tangible results with excellent conversion rates and ROI to prove it, is what we aim for with every project that we undertake. The diverse background of the Myk Baxter Marketing team gives us the ability to provide you with services that can make a difference to your business.
The most stunning graphic user interfaces, brilliant ideas, appropriate keyword optimization and user-friendly sites that are easy to maintain- is our forte. Every solution that we create for you is customized for your business needs. Even as we envision and give shape to your vision, your website gets the visibility it needs. When we are done with creating your website you will be the owner of enviable online property.
We create the weave of design and then strengthen it with the weft of content and marketing to create websites that are stunning, impressive, relevant, content heavy, meaningful and ones that will bring in tangible results for your business through our proven online marketing services. We create, manage, and redesign websites as required, garnish them with all the essential ingredients to create the perfect recipe of success for you.
It may not have yet found a place in the history books, but the creation of the Internet and the subsequent Internet revolution are amongst the biggest achievements in the human history. Every business today will want to thank its creators for the medium of communication they provided them with. Today, online marketing reaches out to one of the largest number of people, and with a relatively better impact rate, affordability and convenience. The Internet and its gift, online marketing, have helped the world in unprecedented ways. A look at the history of online marketing clearly demonstrates how the Internet has made life easier for businesses.
The electronic mail or e-mail was the first step in the direction of using the Internet as a marketing channel. Before 1983, online messaging service was restricted to universities and the military, but Compuserve’s commercial Internet e-mail changed the story, bringing the wonder messaging system to the masses. This was when we had our first e-mail addresses and consumers started sending electronic messages to each other. It was not long before marketers and businesses found the e-mail to be an easy and fast source to reach out to their audience.
It was during the 90’s that Internet began to be used for marketing and advertising purposes. The first online marketing efforts took the form of educational and informative marketing, and soon graphically appealing banner ads also started showing up. When the results of the initial breakthroughs in online marketing were revealed, advertisers around the world were amazed at the statistics. This was when the value of the Internet was established as an effective marketing medium.
Flashing banner ads and e-mail marketing became the two most commonly used forms of online marketing strategies during the 90’s. At the start of the millennium, online marketing had matured to learn from its excesses in the infant stage and moved onto less obtrusive and interruptive form of marketing. Flashing banner ads and pop-ups gradually moved out, and education-based invitational marketing came in.
This was powered by the emergence of Web 2.0 technology. This was when online marketing moved toward relational based marketing and marketers started focusing on their target audience rather than bombarding everyone with their messages and ads. As the Internet kept expanding and reaching out to the global community, everyone including small businesses and new startups started taking advantage of a relatively cheaper and more effective medium to reach their targeted marketplace.
Pay per click or PPC is a highly effective online advertising model that came into existence around 1996. The concept involved advertisers paying the publisher when their ads were clicked on the publisher’s site. A relatively expensive form of advertising, it continues to be in effect in almost the same form, but helps generate effective results. The first documented example of PPC was its application in a web directory known as Planet Oasis. Initially, brands were skeptical to embrace the pay-per-visit model, but by 1997, hundreds of leading companies were spending £0.003 to £0.15 per click in addition to a placement fee.
Google Adwords was the next big thing in the world of online marketing, and search engine optimisation the next big phenomenon. Adwords was tested in 1999 and the full version was launched in 2003 allowing advertisers to serve relevant ads in response to the real-time search queries of searchers. Initially, it was offered on a pay-per-impression basis with the highest bidder appearing the highest on the page. During the first year of limited implementation, Google ads generated over £40 million, making it a successful online marketing tool.
Even during the 90’s website owners and webmasters realised that if their websites were highly visible on search engines, the business results will be higher. This was when the role of content developers became important and more and more webmasters began optimising their sites for search engines. Initially, all that was required was to submit the site URL to the different engines. Search engines would then send their spiders to the page, mine links to other web pages, and carry all the valuable information to index the page.
As everyone started recognising the value of having their websites ranked high on search engine results pages, white hat and black hat optimisers started implementing a world of strategies to get the edge. It was in 1997 that the term “search engine optimisation” came into existence. Search engine optimisation or SEO is one of the most effective forms of Internet marketing strategies that allowed everyone to put their web pages in front of their target audience. It was SEO that led to the coining of the term, “Content is King,” and soon everyone from website owners to webmasters to bloggers were posting keyword-rich and informative content on the web. Today, as Google, Yahoo!, Bing and other search engines upgrade their algorithms, SEO specialists keep evolving with their strategies to remain ahead of the curve.
Online marketing, as we know it today, encompasses almost all forms of online marketing messaging platforms, and this includes the social media. Social networks like online forums and dating sites were the first feel of social media sites for the net users. People were interacting with each other on sites like Friendster, Livejournal, Six Degrees and gaming sites, where advertisers were promoting their businesses mostly via banner advertising. It was in 2003 and 2004 that the social media sites, the way we know them today, came into existence in the form of Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn. Soon businesses were taking advantage of the positive effects of the social networks and began creating their business profiles and promoting their content.
The mobile, especially smart phones and tablets became the next important revolution in the domain of online marketing. As major phone markers allowed third-party developers to build their own phone apps, the world of lucrative mobile marketing channels opened up for businesses. Soon marketers were able to customise the content, experiences and offers based on the location and preferences of the individuals. Online marketing, as we know it today, covers one of the most diverse ranges of web properties on the Internet and reaches out to billions of people. It is growing at the fastest rate and overshadows the traditional forms of marketing. Do you want to promote your business by harnessing the power of the Internet? Feel free to contact us at +44 (0) 20 3239 6647 or info@mykbaxtermarketing.com for any queries to help your business make the most out of the web.
Every website owner, webmaster and anyone who has had some average web experience, knows or has at least heard about SEO. Search engine optimisation is a combination of strategies that we use to help improve the search engine rankings of our website (or web pages). Google is naturally our main target, as it is most widely used by searchers, but we cannot ignore Yahoo!, Baidu, Bing and a number of other search engines with smaller yet niche footprints.
The history of SEO vaguely begins with the history of search engines, but its evolutionary journey has more or less revolved around Google – because that is where most of the web traffic comes from!
Webmasters began optimising their websites for search engines, from around the mid-90s. This was the period when the first search engines started cataloguing the web. SEO today has become quite complicated and challenging; but it was not so in the early days. All you had to do was to submit the URL of your page to different engines so that they could send their “spiders” and get information and links from your pages for indexation purpose. Those were the good old days when webmasters could get higher rankings with small efforts. The story has changed today because of the tough competition and because search engines themselves are working hard to give emphasis to organic and relevant search results!
During the initial years (from 1998 to 2004), most of the index updates could take a few months. Search engines were capable of detecting cross-linking, so initial search engine optimisers found innovative techniques to work their way around. Their experiments proved that page titles, site’s navigational structure and link text affected their rankings.
Today, search algorithms are some of the most complex programs associated with the web. But until 2004, the search algorithms worked mostly on the basis of the webmaster-provided information like Meta tag. The keywords used by the webmaster in the meta tag was used to index pages, but gradually search engines realised that this was not a reliable method as the keywords may or may not be related to the content of the web pages. Besides, web content developers we using techniques within HTML source of web pages to achieve higher search ranking.
Google has remained the largest search engine for a long time, with its current market share being more than 68%. The search engine giant has almost been instrumental in defining the best practices in this industry – through its regular algorithm updates. Some of the major updates that have defined the direction of SEO are as following:
In 2007, Google implemented algorithms that eliminated PageRank sculpting through nofollow attribute on links. SEO experts soon found that using nofollow severely affected their pages’ PR. The SEO industry found solution by develop other techniques that replaced nofollowed tags with obscured JavaScript, enabling PR sculpting.
In 2010, the search engine giant announced Google Caffeine, which allowed users to find a variety of content, especially forum posts and news results, relatively sooner after being published. Google Caffeine was a major milestone in speeding up the process of indexation. This was followed by Google Instant and a number of other algorithm updates at other search engines that allowed fresh content to rank faster in search results. Thus came the era in SEO where keeping your content updated could help you improve your search rankings!
A significant percentage of SEO revolved around content (and continues to do so). But Google released its Panda update in 2011 to penalise sites that were using duplicate content from other web properties. Before Panda, webmasters and content developers were copying content from each other to improve their search engine rankings. With Google Panda in place, the old adage had changed from “content is king” to “unique content is king!”
By this time, the leading search engine had become hyperactive with regard to curbing the manipulative techniques being used in SEO. The Google Penguin update penalised sites using such techniques to ensure that searchers received more useful and organic search results. This was followed by the Hummingbird update in 2013, which improved the search engine’s semantic understanding and language processing capabilities for web pages.
Today, SEO is a quite vast process comprising of a number of strategies used to improve search engine rankings of web pages or websites. It involves application of on-page and off-page techniques, whilst remaining within the limitations of search engine guidelines, to help achieve the best-possible rankings in search results. If you have any query about implementing effective SEO strategies for your website(s), feel free to contact us at Myk Baxter Marketing. We can be reached at +44 (0) 20 3239 6647.
SixDegrees, developed in 1997, is the first identifiable social media site, even though there were a few so-called social sites before it. This site allowed members to upload their profile and make friends. The era of blogging sites started in 1999, creating a kind of social media environment that continues to be quite popular today.
Computerised Bulletin Board System is considered to be the first form of online social media which allowed users to communicate and download files and games, and even post messages. BBS, as these systems came to be known as, were already active from the 70s, before AOL and CompuServe came. CompuServe (Beginning in 1980s) allowed its members to access and share news, events and files, and send messages to friends via e-mail.
AOL (1985 onwards), is however, considered to be the true forerunner to the current-day social networking sites. AOL members could create their complete and searchable profiles and enjoy a lot of social functions.
Finding old schoolmates seems to be a great idea, but most of the current-day social media sites are surprisingly not based on this concept. But this was all that Classmates.com was about! Launched in 1995, it was an instant hit and even today it has over 57 million accounts. A number of other social sites propped up around the same idea, but gradually the successful sites in the social networking domain emerged to be the ones without any specific niches.
Friendster - Released in 2002, Friendster redefined the concept of SixDegrees to create a “Circle of Friends” through genuine “common bonds.” Its interface has many features that remind us of dating sites. After its initial success, the social networking site gradually shrunk to a few countries in Southeast Asia before transforming from a social networking to an online gaming site.
MySpace – MySpace was the current-day Facebook of the early years. Introduced in 2003, the site became a favourite, especially with the young due to its exemplary focus on music and a funky environment. The heydays of the social site seem to be over, as it fields around 36 million users now.
LinkedIn – This social site came across the horizon with a different approach in 2003. It is a networking site for professionals and business people who want to connect with people with similar interests. Deviating from the “friend” tag, LinkedIn named user contacts to be “connections.” Currently, this social site for professionals has almost 300 million active members.
Facebook – Facebook was launched in 2004 by a group of university students to connect with other students. It was only in 2006 that the social networking site stepped out into the open. It continued to grow at a steady pace until 2009-10 when it emerged as a major player in the industry. Its current tally of 1.32 billion users stands as a record, making Facebook a phenomenon in the web world.
The reason for Facebook’s success is claimed to be a combination of its easy-to-access features, its impressive name and the ease of use of its interface. It is not a niche-based social site, but has a more general approach to everything – allowing users to post and share statuses, photos and videos, and chat with friends. Facebook has a video chat feature too which it keeps pulling back time and again only to provide again to counter competitor video chat features.
YouTube – Everyone knows YouTube as a video sharing site, but very few of us also know that it is also a social networking site and a search engine. Introduced in 2005, it provided an entirely new way for people to communicate with each other. Today, the site allows you to create and share videos and communicate with users from around the world. YouTube has long crossed the member-count of 1 billion. Currently, more than 4 billion videos are streamed on this site every day.
Twitter – One of the true competitors to Facebook (in terms of activity), Twitter is a social-plus-microblogging service. Launched in 2006, the “blue bird” boasts over half a billion active users and around 1.6 billion search queries in a single day. The origin of this “sms of the Internet” finds its roots in a single-day brainstorming session at Odeo, a podcasting company. Twitter allows users to send 140-character text messages known as “tweets” and share photos and videos.
Google+ - When Google realised that it was lagging behind others in the social domain, it launched Google+ in 2011. It isn’t a dedicated social media site, but extends across the entire Google experience through its social cover. Besides other features involving rich-media, Google+’s Hangouts has gained a lot of attention. According to the last report, Google’s social adventure has over 540 million active users every month.
Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube may seem to be the biggest social media sites, but there are others with their niche domains, and they too are enjoying some decent daily traffic. Pinterest, Tumblr, Foursquare, delicious and Spotify are just few to name. Most of these sites, including the biggies, are linked in one way or the other allowing cross-posting. All this means that individual and business users can reach more and more people through these sites!
Do you want to reach out to the hundreds of millions of users on these social sites? We at Myk Baxter Marketing can provide professional solutions to your demands. We are the experts in social media optimisation and marketing, and we could be reached at +44 (0) 20 3239 6647.
Today, the world of web designing has reached a stage where it is possible for anyone with basic computer skills to create a decent website. It was not always this way, as it involved a lot of programming, coding and tweaking. http://info.cern.ch/ was the first website, published in 1991, and the URL of its first web page was http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. As we explore the history and evolution of web designing, we find it to be more colourful and vibrant down the line.
The history of web design may not be long (spanning just two decades), but it has brought some major changes in almost every aspect of our life. It is web design that adds colour and life to the Internet.
Tim Berners-Lee proposed a global hypertext project in 1989 and later it went on to become the World Wide Web. It was in 1991 that the web came into existence and we could view text-only pages using a basic line-mode browser. The Mosaic was the earliest graphic design-integrated browser, developed in 1993.
HyperText Markup Language or HTML, created in 1990, is the official language of the web. During the 90s, all the online documents (websites) were created in HTML. They had linear layout and with more text than any graphics. The concept of hypertext was developed by Ted Nelson in the 60s, but it was only in the 80s that Tim Berners-Lee started using the coding language. At that time, HTML was the only coding language in web designing and web designers had limited options when it came to design. Text, links and tables were all the elements that the web designers could use to create these early websites.
The World Wide Web Consortium, which we readily recognise as the W3C was formed in 1994 (again by Tim Berners-Lee) for preventing commercial interests from creating monopoly in the domain of web design code. The consortium continues to govern the coding rules, guidelines and techniques and keeps updating web designers to the changes they should be following.
All these early developments were part of the first generation of web design, leading to development of simple websites (by today’s standards). Around 1994, web designers and developers began contributing to HTML codes, bringing more versatility. This phase in the history of web design is considered to be the second generation. The HTML 1 tags evolved to HTML 2 and web designers were able to get access to new capabilities. In addition, the Internet became faster now. During this generation coding became more sophisticated, and more websites started using colours and graphics.
1995 marked the third generation in web design and the creation of HTML 3. This was the generation when we saw the release of the Internet Explorer, one of the most widely used web browsers in the history of the web. The other major developments of the phase include the application of HTML B tables and style sheets.
Websites were more colourful than ever and many sites had patterned backgrounds. The other major developments of the phase include the conception of “gif” and the consequent use of animated images; and the introduction of Flash that helped create some of the most graphic-intensive websites. This was when web design moved from static to dynamic.
This is the age of the modern day websites, which is has further moved on from HTML 4 to HTML 5. Today, web designers have other coding systems available besides HTML, including XML, CSS and JavaScript.
All the shortcomings of HTML and XHTML were addressed and resolved in HTML 5, providing solutions to most of the issues and adding many new syntax features. The most notable ones include integrating SVG content and addition of audio, video and canvas, allowing the easier integration of multimedia content. Earlier, it was needed to use heavy plug-in for achieving many of these tasks. Earlier HTML versions were not compatible with all the browsers, but with HTML 5 it is an entirely different story. It is compatible with almost all the most commonly used browsers including Google Chrome, IE, Safari, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and others.
With smart phone makers shipping more than a billion phones last year; 30% of Facebook users visiting through their phones; and the claim that 4 out of every 5 Internet users will be mobile users in the near future, web designers and developers are now also building sites for the mobile. If our websites are no longer mobile-friendly, we could be losing a significant number of our prospective visitors.
Smart phones enhance the web experience by offering faster load time, providing better availability and usability. Mobile web design may be moving back to simplification to adjust to the smaller screen and less powerful machines, the underlying web design technology is quite sophisticated.
This is the era where web designers are working around and experimenting with new technologies, graphics, videos, animation and games. At the same time, they cannot ignore the importance of SEO for the eventual success of their designs. In addition to being a powerful medium of communication, the Internet is now moving into new dimensions of entertainment, social and other developing fields.
Do you want to build a website or update your website(s) with the latest best practices and technologies in web design? We at Myk Baxter Marketing are your total web solutions provider. You can contact us during business hours at +44 (0) 20 3239 6647 or email enay time info@mykbaxtermarketing.com for the most advanced, effective and affordable web design solutions.
Web development covers the non-design elements of your website – the more complex ones associated with coding and writing markup. As the web developed over the years, new web development technologies have made things easier for developers. Let’s look at some of the major advances in the history of this important aspect of the Internet and how they shaped the web as we know it today.
The Linux kernel was released in 1991, which in later years became the original web server software. It is important to the history and evolution of web development because the Internet revolves around this software. Today, it is the software used by almost every web host, and most of the web development efforts are based on it.
The CSS was already around since the 70s. The release of the CSS level 1 Recommendation by the W3C in 1996 is another major milestone in the history of web development. It was followed by the release of Internet Explorer 3 with limited CSS support. CSS allowed the developer to easily and instantly call external style sheets to make design changes throughout the site without the need to make challenging inline style changes. Thus, we no longer needed to check each HTML page to make alterations to each style elements.
1995 - PHP was released in 1995, and soon became one of the most widely used dynamic languages and a part and parcel of every web developer’s toolkit. Today, PHP is the standard language for web development, and powers over a million web servers. The language allows web developers to build and maintain advanced and database-based websites; it supports SQL databases, HTML and is based on web server. The most popular websites we know today are powered by PHP, including Facebook, Wikipedia and Yahoo! Web software applications like WP, Drupal and Joomla also run on it.
1998 – The Open Source movement had been around since the early days of the Internet. In 1998, the Freeware Summit coined the term, “open source” and kicked-off the Open Source Initiative. Although licensing was provided to help protect software and their developers, it was possible for others to modify or distribute the source code. It will not be wrong to say that most of the modern web is powered by open source through software and platforms like PHP, WordPress, Linux and Firefox. If it was not so, we would have had a costlier and closed web development environment with lesser innovativeness. Ruby on Rails Rereleased
2004 – At a time when Mozilla Firefox was released and was allowing web developers to make the most of an open source web browser, Ruby on Rails was released to introduce the concepts of frameworks and agile software development. Since Ruby on Rails’ release many web development frameworks based on PHP and other languages have become available to developers. This model-view-controller framework is highly effective in eliminating repetitive (and time consuming) tasks in coding. The result – some of the leading sites such as Twitter have developed total web service solutions using nothing else but web frameworks.
Amazon launched “pay as you go” cloud web services in 2006, providing a much cheaper and faster alternative to conventional web servers. This ready availability of cloud storage proved to be a big leap in the industry allowing easier entry for any web developer, thus leading to more innovation.
Mobile web development offers both challenges and opportunities to developers because of the unique features of the mobile devices. Latest smart phones and PC tablets may be more powerful than the early computers, they also come with a fixed set of limitations that don’t exist for desktop web development. Developers now have to build websites for an audience that could be accessing their sites on a powerful desktop or on a mobile device with smaller screen, slower Internet connection and lesser memory, without affecting the user experience. The latest mobile web development applications are being developed around these concerns with good amount of success.
If you want to promote your business, it is important that you develop a good website. We at Myk Baxter Marketing are amongst the most reputable web development service providers. Reach out to us at +44 (0) 20 3239 6647 or email info@mykbaxtermarketing.com to clear any queries.
Pay Per Click or PPC advertising continues to be a highly effective advertising solution for small or large businesses, or individuals. PPC has long served the web world well, allowing everyone to drive traffic and leads even when other methods failed to generate desired results. Today, when we talk about PPC, Google is the first thing that comes to our mind. Interestingly, it was not Google where the story of PPC started. The first documented form of PPC was implemented in Planet Oasis, a web directory.
1996 - The first PPC campaign, created by Ark Interface II featured links to commercial and informational sites. A year after the pay per visit model was introduced, more than 400 leading brands were using it.
1998 – GoTo developed and presented their PPC search engine concept at the TED Conference in 1998. It was this concept that lead to the creation of the PPC advertising system that we know of as today. GoTo was later renamed Overture, and then it was taken over by Yahoo! In fact, Bill Gross of GoTo is given the credit for conceiving the actual concept.
Google came across the PPC horizon in 2000 when it launched its AdWords system. Advertisers could use the system for creating their text-based ads and posting on the search engine. But it was not actually the true PPC model (from Google), which was eventually introduced only two years later. In 2002, Google launched their PPC ad system charging advertisers at cost per mille or cost per thousand impressions.
In 2001, AdWords generated more than £50 million in revenue, but GoTo’s (Overture) model generated four times the amount by offering PPC ads. Google had to revamp their AdWords model to counter Overture’s Pay Per Click model. The guys at Google found a flaw in their archrival’s PPC auction model and exploited it; and AdWords went on to topple Overture’s dominance and came to be known as the advertising system as we know it today.
Google AdWords continued to dominate the landscape for several years. In 2010, Microsoft adCenter and Yahoo! Search Marketing joined hands and created AdCenter (PPC platform) that used Bing as their search engine. The network grew to include many third-party websites and allowed AdCenter ads to post text and banner ads on their website. The two IT giants named this network to be BingAds.
During the initial years, the CPC was quite low. Some of the earliest PPC engines included FindWhat, Enhance, Kanoodle, LookSmart, Quigo and Findology. Today, PPC may be easier than before but it can be challenging too. The engines are far better, making things easier but the growing competition has increased the challenge. One of the major differences in the early and current era is in terms of CPC. At one time we couldn’t think of paying more than £2 per click. But today, paying even £20 per click may not be a big thing.
Are you looking for a faster and more effective way to drive traffic and leads to your site? We at Myk Baxter Marketing can help you implement a successful PPC campaign. We have been servicing small to large businesses for years.
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