Saturday, April 3, 2010

Marketing Your Website

The internet provides you with a number of free ways to market your business and your website.

Analytics

Use a free package like Google Analytics to measure and check which sources drive traffic to your website and ensure that you focus your marketing efforts towards the traffic sources that drive traffic that does not bounce straight off your site. If you have a bounce rate of more than 30-40% look at the page these people are landing on and see whether you can make it more appealing. You want to entice people deeper into your website or to purchase goods or services from you.

Build Good Content

Make sure you update the website content on a regular basis. Make sure your webs pages reflect recent changes in your industry and make it informative and helpful so that users bookmark your site and refer other people to it.

Build Links

Every good website that links to you provides a “vote” for your website. Google respects those votes and will therefore give your website more prominance in search results. Earn links by having wonderfully interesting content that people want to keep referring back to or if there is some online service you can provide then do so for free and people will bookmark or favourite your website as they will want to keep coming back to use the tools. Other websites will also link to you. Buying links, link exchange and link farms are not the way to go. Good interesting heplful content and active helpful participation in forums and in blog comments will earn you good links. 5 good quality links are worth more than 100 unrelated links - you want to earn links from websites whose content has relevance to your websites content.

Social Media

Use social media like Twitter and facebook to build relationships with people and to advertise your goods or services. Good online business relationships will drive traffic and business to you.

Google Alerts

Set up Google alerts for your name and your business name so that you can keep an eye on what the online community is saying about you and your business.

Persue all of these things and watch your online reputation grow, it will not happen instantly but consistent action by you will bring results over time.

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

SEO and Web Design Checklist VII - Miscellaneous

Miscellaneous Points

1. Use Analytics to track visits to your website particularly when running any advertising or promotion campain. See which promotion methods produce most visitors with lowest bounce rate, ideally less than 50%.
Monitor which pages are landed on and which page most visitors leave from. Do they leave your site from that page because they have lost interest or is the leaving page the order page. If it is the order page are you getting a corresponding number of orders or are people leaving your site at this stage because this page is too complicated or confusing and they are leaving because it is too difficult for them to complete their purchase.
Check what search terms in search engines bring most visitors to your website, do you ned to increase your website optimisation to include more similar phrases to those search terms or alternatively is this a search term that is not relevant to your website’s contents so do you need to re-write the website content to include more appropriate phrases.
2. Check that you have not over-used your keywords and phrases, ideally they should form 3-9% of the page content.
3. Do not buy or sell links.
4. Do not Spam by leaving links in forums inappropriately or leaving spam links as comments on blogs etc as spam software will classify your IP as a source of spam and your website’s performance will be affected.
5. Do not have your website set up so that the search engines are fed one page but visitors see another, this is called Cloaking and will result in penalties.
6. Check regularly in Webmaster Tools to see what the Googlebot sees, this will ensure you will spot any hacking of your website. Some hackers insert code so that although visitors see your normal webpage, search engines are directed off elsewhere. If you find malware remove it.
7. If you have hidden text on your website it will be penalised - don’t do it.
8. If you are setting up some online directory listings for your business do not just copy some of the text off your website as duplicate content can cause problems in search engine results as Google’s algorithm trys to ensure that the search results are unique and relevant so that searchers are not confronted with a list of pages that essentially all have the same content. Consequently you could find your website dropped from the search results in favour of them showing the directory listing.
9. Make sure you register your domain with Google Webmaster Tools.
10. Submit your website’s sitemap to Webmaster Tools every time you change your website’s structure.
11. Set up 301 redirects every time you change a page’s url or the domain on which your website is hosted.
12. If you have regularly changing content on a blog or ordinary website set up an RSS feed and use Feedburner to notify Google etc when new posts are added and set up automatic updates to twitter etc to ensure your new items come up in real-time search.

SEO and Web Design Checklist VI - Backlinks

Backlinks ie other websites mentioning and linking to your website are important as they indicate in general terms to the search engines how popular your website is, however it is not quite as simple as that and you do need to be careful about who is linking to you. Obviously you do not have control over which websites link to you but there are some simple thigs you can do to keep a check on your backlinks. The most obvious way to ensure good quality links to your website is to write good quality updated content ensuring that you do not use words or phrases that indicate spammy or bad subjects or websites.

One easy way to keep a check on which websites are mentioning or linking to you is to set up Google alerts for your company name and domain address. The other is to regularly check the backlinks listed in Webmaster Tools.

1. Look at the quality and Relevancy of websites linking to your website paying attention too to the content of the page that the link is on. If these websites have absolutely no relevancy to your website consider emailing the webmaster to ask for the link to be removed. You cannot oblige them to do this but it is worth asking.
2. Backlinks from websites on servers different to your own website host are more valuable, you want a variety if IP addresses linking to your website.
3. Try and ensure that there is some diversity in the links to your website, if most of your incoming links are from social networking websites try and find another source of links, maybe by submitting articles to article directories or respected blogs for your industry.
4. Look at the anchor text used for the inbound links and ensure that the link text includes the keywords and phrases that you are wanting to target. If the anchor text for a particular link is not what you want again try emailing the webmaster to ask for it to be changed if possible.
5. Try and gain links from different TLDs eg .gov, .com, .co.uk,
6. Obtaining high authority links for example from BBC, CNN etc is particularly valuable.
7. Try and make sure you do not have backlinks from bad neighborhoods eg malware, spam or inappropriate content websites.
8. Reciprocal links are of little value, however if you do participate in this try and ensure that your link is not just listed on a page but forms part of a paragraph of text relevant to your business.
9. Check the speed of adding backlinks to your website, a sudden increase of say a hundred links every few days will flag your site as buying links in and your website will be penalised in searches. Try to increase inbound links at no more than 30 or so a week. If there is a sudden increase in the inbound links to your website check where those links are coming from, this can easily be done in Google Webmaster Tools.
10. If you can get mentions and links in Wikipedia and Dmoz these can be very valuable.
11. Check the location of an incoming link, links in the footer or navigation of a web page have less authority than a link within a relevant paragraph within the body text.
12. Check the alt attributes of images linking in to your website by looking at the source code for the web page linking to you. If this alt attribute does not include keywords for your business then consider emailing the webmaster to ask for it to be changed.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Website Design Checklist V - Using Keywords

Once you have worked out your keywords or phrases for each page ensure you have done the following.

Have I used my keywords properly?

Yes if you have;
1. Put your Keywords for that page at the BEGINNING the title of the page and have removed the word HOME from the title of the home page. Unless say you are an interior designer that word does not help your SEO one bit!
2. Put your Keywords for that page in the main heading (h1) for that page.
3. Used your Keywords for that page in Alt attributes for any images on the page.
4. Used your Keywords for that page in anchor text of internal links pointing to that page.
5. Made your page’s Keywords bold and italic within the page content a few times. Don’t overdo it.
6. Used your page Keywords the the beginning and end of the body text.
7. Used Keywords in the folder names leading to your page instead of generics like subpages etc.
8. Used Keywords in the URL for your page.

Website Design Checklist IV - Structure

1. Does your website have a robots.txt file that correctly limits the access of search engine robots to say login, search results pages etc. Have you checked the robots.txt file using Google Webmaster Tools. Ensure that any pages you do not want index have the meta tag noindex.
2. How often do you update the website content? Try to update at least a part of the website on a weekly basis, diary this to ensure weeks do not pass without the website’s content being updated.
3. How many pages are there on your website, the more pages of useful updated content the better. Visitors and search engines robots will keep coming back for more.
4. Have you constructed a sitemap and submitted it to Google via Webmaster Tools. Check with Webmaster Tools that there are no problems with the sitemap and remedy any errors.
5. Does your website have either a search facility or, a user as opposed to search engine, sitemap?
6. Is it easy for visitors to contact you, do you have full contact details on your website offering a number of options eg online form, direct email, telephone number, address etc. Remember that all businesses in the UK are obliged to provide full contact details on their website. Providing contact details will help you appear in local searches.
7. If necessary does your website have details of your privacy policy, terms and conditions of business etc.
8. Does your website have testimonials from clients, examples of your work etc to increease visitor trust.
9. Check that you are not duplicating the same content over several pages of your website, if so remove it, and check that you do not have multiple urls pointing to the same page.
10. Check your website’s page loading time under labs in Webmaster Tools, if it is too slow take measures to decrease the load speed by compressing images, CSS etc and using gzip compression if allowed by your server.
11. Look at the popularity of your website pages, not just the home page. If there are few links to inner pages try and build links to those pages.
12. Ensure that your website has links to any social media websites you participate in for example, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and have icons that allow individual pages to be notified to Digg or saved as bookmarks etc.

There are other posts on this blog and our main SEO4all website dealing with many of these issues.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Web Design Checklist III - Content

Content

  1. Content should be UNIQUE, useful and grammatically correct.
  2. Amount of content - at the barest minumum you need to have at least 300 words per page.
  3. If you have a lot of textual messages in graphics do you have a textual equivalent? Search engines and screen readers for people with sight problems cannot read the words within graphics.
  4. Do all graphics have alt and title attributes completed with useful descriptions but with no keyword stuffing.
  5. Ensure content is updated to take into account any seasonality in searches.
  6. Avoid using stop words where more useful words (possibly keywords) can be used instead.
  7. Ensure your content contains the types of phrases that people searching for your type of product might put into a search engine.
  8. As Google has now introduced its Answer Highlighting ensure that your website's content includes the types of questions searchers may put into search engines AND the answer.
  9. Check your website's content regularly to ensure a hacker has not inserted text or links.
  10. Do not have hidden content.
  11. Do not overuse keywords, no one keyword should have a density of more than 8% of the page. Use Webmaster Tools to see which words occur most frequently on your website and if these are not the words you wish then rewrite your copy.

Web Design Checklist II - Website Architecture

Website Architecture

When constructing your website bear in mind the following points and check your website out to ensure it complies with all disability requirements and that it is constructed well so that it renders well in different browsers and is easily indexed by search engines.
  1. URL structure - do the urls use sessionids etc or are they search engine friendly, see Search Engine Friendly URLs;
  2. HTML structure - make sure pages are constructed using divs not tables. Tables are only used now for tabulated data. Do not use frames, avoid using Flash etc, see Search Engine Friendly Websites;
  3. Use external CSS and JS files;
  4. Navigation - is it the same on every page and is it clear. Every page on your website should be no more than 2 clicks from the home page.
  5. Website accessibility - test your website so that it complies with all disability and accessibilty requirements, see SEO Tools;
  6. Use of rel=canonical, see Using rel=canonical;
  7. Coding, check your HTML and CSS is compliant, see Website Tools;

Web Design Checklist I - Domains

Choosing Your Domain

1. Domain age - older domains have more credence as spamming websites are normally short-lived so older more longstanding domains are indexed better. Likewise if there is less than a year left until you need to re-register the domain consider renewing it immediately;
2. Domain registration information hidden/anonymous - serious businesses would not leave their information hidden to the public;
3. Type of domain - in this country you will find that .co.uk domains are indexed faster than .com so unless you have an international business buy a .co.uk domain.;
4. Domain past owners - if you are buying a “second hand” domain check very carefully as to how many previous owners there have been, how often did the owner change, where was the domain hosted, what business was carried out on the domain. You do not want your website to gain the poor reputation of a business previously hosted on the domain.
5. Keywords in the domain - try and have at least one keyword in the domain, separate any words using hyphens as search engines will see the domain as being made up of separate words as opposed to one long meaningless string. If you do use hyphens avoid having more than 1 or 2 in the domain name.