Magicdust Makes the BRW Fast 100

magicdust makes the brw fast 100 imageThe latest BRW Magazine special edition has hit the shelves and this month sees the publication of the 2011 Fast 100, a list of Australian companies growing at high speed. This year’s list sees 56 new entrants and amongst them is Magicdust, making its debut entry at a commendable 76.

This years fast 100 has 24 companies in the information media and telecommunications sector with the next largest sector being the 22 companies in the professional, scientific and technical services sector.

Only two of the fast 100 are traded on the ASX though the total staff employed number is 4,576 and total revenue is $4.1 billion. 52 of the fast 100 companies were started from the family home!

Managing Director, Ian Mills has also been quoted in the Australian Financial Review when he commented on how getting the right mix of people is essential to a business as the morale of the whole business benefits from the right staff acquisitions.

Small Business SEO

Small Business SEO – Getting Listed in Search Engine Organic Results

small business seo imageGetting listings in the ‘normal’ organic results is a science/art known as search engine optimisation (or SEO for short). It has relatively little to do with the site design, it is really more based on the content of your website. Google and the other search engines like good content and plenty of it so that is the starting point. The foremost thing to understand for small business SEO is that  it is vital to have good unique content that offers value to the searcher.

SEO is a long term process of optimising the content and structure of your web pages along with an ongoing campaign to acquire links to your site from other relevant sites. Be aware it can take many months, even years in some cases, to see results for particular keywords (search terms used by web users). Naturally, the more sites trying to get listed for the same keywords, the harder it is to get to the top of the search results.

You can get off to a good start by ensuring the meta titles of your pages are different to each other and are keyword focussed, e.g. if your company was selling widgets you might have a page with the meta title “Widget Sales”, another page titled “Designer Widgets” or “Discount Widgets” etc. The content of those pages would of course be all about those particular subjects. You might even have a page heading above your paragraphs with the same keyword in bold print. Read more »

Small Business Websites

What’s the problem with small business and websites in Australia?

According to the MYOB Business Monitor Report in February 2011 only 35% of the Australian businesses surveyed had a website and only 18% use social media for business purposes.

While that figure might seem extremely small to those of us involved in internet marketing, one only has to walk around a shopping mall or high street to see the many small businesses, all the hair salons, cafes, mechanics, pharmacies and so many more who probably all use internet banking and eBay yet who have not yet taken the step of putting their business online. small business websites

Interestingly, the same survey points to a finding that those businesses with websites are performing better than those without and lots of businesses agree they would actually do more business if they put some effort into online marketing. Read more »

Website Redesign

website redesignMagicdust is happy to launch its new website today! Our designers have been busy with our latest website redesign over the last couple of months and are finally ready to let it loose. The new design includes a blog section which we’ll be using to keep you updated on all things Magicdust and to publish and link to information that helps you make the most out of your site.

The planning and redesign of our website has prompted us to think more about the future of doing business online too, so to accompany our redesign, we’re also ‘getting our social on’, becoming more active on Facebook and Twitter so if you use those services (and if you have a small business website you probably should be using Facebook at least!) do please follow us there too.

We have some other cool things in development at Magicdust which we will be rolling out over the coming weeks. All in all, it has been a very busy few months here working on the redesign of our website, developing our new offerings, planning our marketing and we see some exciting times ahead. Read more »