Category: Web Marketing

Pt 1 - Choosing a Website For the Right Reasons

So you've made the decision that you want a website. Maybe you're a small business looking to move your company profile online; or a sole trader hoping for new leads and business contacts; or perhaps you're thinking that if all your competitors are presently online then you should be too.

Reasons may differ, but one thing is certain, you shouldn't just do it for the sake of it and expect your business to be revolutionised overnight. After all, you're going to be paying a substantial sum of money to see your website designed, developed and put online. You should really have your goals set out long before any money exchanges hands.

A common mistake to make is the belief that once your website is visible, the visitors will start flooding in. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Imagine your website as an acorn on a forest floor. What are the chances of that one specific acorn being found amongst all the other acorns that have fallen from the multitude of oak trees spread across the acreage that makes up the forest? Do we really need to answer that? The odds are stacked insurmountably against that one acorn ever being found.

There are so many businesses that have fallen into the trap of putting their website onto the internet and then left it at that. Maybe they think that after spending a reasonable sum on the web design in the first place, they shouldn't need to spend any more.

Unfortunately this isn't the case.

Websites need marketing, just as you'd market any other aspect of your business. After all, you wouldn't spend money on an advertising campaign and then shut the resulting literature away in a bottom drawer so nobody would ever see it. Not unless it was really bad, of course.

But there are those that apply this mentality to their website.

If you've no intention of marketing your website, then you'd be better off forgetting the idea and saving your money. You certainly won't see a return on that initial investment.

But if you're still determined to have your website, and recognise the marketing in some form will be required, the second part of this article will discuss the options open to you

Pt 2 - Weighing Up the Online Marketing Available

In the first part of this article we decided that it was pointless having a website if you've no intention of marketing it. In the second part we take at look at the online marketing options that are open to you.

Excluding PPC (Pay-Per-Click), which is another article entirely, there are two main types of online marketing. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and SMO (Social Media Optimisation). SEO is perhaps the better known of the two.

Search engine optimisation deals with increasing a website's visibility and traffic through search engine rankings.

Take a look at Google, the world's biggest search engine, for instance. For a great many people, Google is the internet. There is no other alternative, and so the only way they'll ever reach your website is through Google's Search Engine Rankings Pages (SERPs). Therefore the higher your site is in these rankings, the more traffic it will get.

Now, as mentioned in the first part of this article, having a successful website isn't simply a case of getting it built then sitting back and waiting for the visitors to come flooding in. The same can be said for search engine optimisation.

SEO is an ongoing process. It isn't a case of making simple adjustments then letting the beast fly. There are on-site and off-site factors to be addressed and once rankings have been achieved they need to be maintained and built upon, or else they'll quickly slip away.

Search engines work on the premise that a user types some keywords relevant to what it is they're searching for into a search box, and the search engine then returns a list of web pages ranked against the elements that make up their internal algorithm. It is knowing which keywords the user (and potential customer) is likely to be inputting that is of importance here.

Therefore keyword research is necessary to determine which keyword phrases to place on your web pages. They must be relevant to your website and enjoy a healthy search volume if you're going to be successful.

Once the keyword research is completed then comes the task of placing your chosen keyword phrases into your copy, and into the title tags and headline tags. It is knowing how to use these phrases in a natural, non-intrusive way and where to place them throughout your website that is the work of the SEO.

There is also the creation of linkable content, the updating of content, and an internal linking structure that need to be dealt with.

Nowadays websites have to be just as accessible to the user at home as the search engines, so it's no use stuffing your pages with keywords in the hope they rank higher for it. Search engines are pretty smart, and have developed ways of detecting when somebody is trying to cheat them or manipulate their ranking.

Off-site SEO is largely concerned with link building; this is attaining links that point to your website, marking you out as a site of some importance in the eyes of the search engines.

This brings us neatly to SMO, or Social Media Optimisation.

Social media optimisation is a lot closer to traditional marketing practices than you may think. It carries the same principles you might use in networking, but transfers them to the internet. There are social media websites and social networking websites where you can promote your content; these can be a great source of traffic to your website, although it is largely unqualified. The real beauty of social media optimisation is that it's an excellent way of branding your company online.

A lot of businesses will implement a blog, and then leave it to fall stagnant because of time constraints or other reasons.

They're missing a wonderful opportunity to not only keep a constant stream of fresh content moving through their website, which will have an effect on their search engine rankings, but to also provide useful information specific to their market.

Couple this with a successful social media campaign and you could see yourself becoming an authority website in your particular niche. Authority websites attract those all important links with ease.

Using both SEO and SMO together can be a potent force, and lay the path for future success.

Remember, a website can do wonders for your business; there is no mistake in that. But you have to market it, and you have to be prepared to do the continual - often hard, often unrewarding - follow-up work if you want this success. Either that or pay somebody else to do it.

About the Author

Nick James writes for Essence SEO and Essence Design. The former are a UK SEO company providing UK SEO services.

Category: Web Design

Introduction

A website development project has many component parts. Some are well understood, some are misunderstood and some come as a complete surprise. This document outlines the many aspects of a web development project and demystifies them.

We need a website

Not surprisingly web development projects often start with this premise. A variation on this theme might be 'Our website is looking dated, we need a new one...' To many, the first stage, having established the need is to embark on the design. This is wrong.

KEY POINT Starting a web project by looking at the design is wrong

The first stage of a website development project is to establish the need. This however does not mean simply deciding you need a website. Establishing the need means understanding the needs of your business and the needs of your customers and how a website might address those needs. For example:

- Our clients need access to support documentation for our products 24/7
- Our clients need to be able to view our available rental equipment in real time
- We need to showcase our products and services. We need to sell our products globally, 24/7
- We need to provide new communication channels for our clients


Not surprisingly this phase of the project is often referred to as needs analysis. This work is key to the success of a web development project but is often poorly executed or even ignored in favor of getting on with the sexy stuff such as design and photography.

Someone a lot smarter than me summarized the result of ignoring needs analysis thus. "The customer doesn't know what he wants until he sees what he gets, realizes it's not what he needs even though it's exactly what he asked for."

This is perhaps the most testing aspect of a web development project and if it doesn't hurt the chances are you are not doing it properly. A detailed common understanding of what success looks like will prove invaluable as the project progresses and will give the whole project team clear terms of reference.

KEY POINT Establish the needs of the business. Understand the needs of the different stakeholder groups

Build it without any glitz.

This approach assumes you are adopting the web development practice of separating content from presentation. In simple terms this means the content of your site, the words, pictures etc., are separated from the look and feel or design elements. This can be achieved through the use of a Content Management System (CMS) and technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). A CMS will also ensure your site can be maintained by non-techies as it hides all the code and script that makes your website work behind simple tools similar in functionality to a modern word processor.

KEY POINT Use a system that provides separation between content and presentation

By using this method you can develop your website with a plain design and once you have your content, navigation and functionality sorted you can simply overlay the final design. Think of it as a rehearsal for a play wearing jeans and a tee shirt, everything is in place and all that's missing are the costumes and lighting. At this stage you don't need to worry about the real copy, you can use a lorum ipsum generator (Google it) to create dummy content as a space filler. This approach allows the content and functionality of the site to drive the project instead of the design. Sound strange? Let me explain.

It's very unlikely you are building a website in the hope that nobody will visit it. In fact it's very likely that once your site is finished you will want lots of people to visit it. One of the ways to generate visitors to your website is by establishing it on the major search engines, such as Google. Can you ever remember a Google search that listed sites by how good they look? No; Google indexes your site by reading its content, it doesn't care a jot what the site looks like.

KEY POINT Your content plays a significant part in how Google will rank your site, the visual design plays virtually none

I'm not suggesting the design isn't important I am however saying if the design compromises the site's content you may pay the price with a poor search engine ranking, and if the design compromises functionality you will alienate your users.

Website design

I'm not a designer but like most people I have an opinion on design. We have a design team and we rely on their skills to make a website work. Unfortunately when it comes to web design everybody is an expert. However, when you trawl through the web it's clear that everybody is not an expert.

KEY POINT Do not make the mistake of assuming because you can use Photoshop you can design a website

Here are some design tips:

-Use a professional web designer
-Don't create your entire site with Flash
-Make sure the final design complies with web standards
-Don't use tables for design layout
-Don't use any inline styles, use CSS
-Use somebody who understands all of the above!

Website content

Up to this point you have been using dummy content to help your designer, but you now need to develop the real content.

The content of your website is what Google reads when it indexes it. Although your web pages may use META tags a short hidden description of the page it's claimed Google prefers to read the same content people read. However Google doesn't use people to index your site, it uses software, sometimes called a spider. The content of your site has to be tagged to allow these spiders to figure out what it's about. Effective tagging is covered in Part II of this document.

Consider SEO right from the start

There are many great SEO check lists out there but they are sometimes a little long and confusing. Here's a concise SEO check list.

-Research your market and understand what people are searching for
-Write content that matches your research
-Build your site using clean code and well tagged content
-Ask for and try to attract relevant links
-Measure it all and fine tune it with an analytics package
-Repeat until you succeed!

Conclusion

Online success doesn't come easily. You have to consider all the many aspect of a web project from visitors needs through to measuring the success. This article is intended to set you off in the right direction.

About the Author

David A Robinson - http://www.redevolution.com