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Build it and they will come! Or will they?

by Jaimie Dobson

In its last report on the matter the Office of National Statistics stated that Internet sales rose 29% to £130.4bn in 2006 over a 2005 figure of £101bn. That’s a big jump. No doubt the figures for 2007 will show a similar if not greater leap when they are released later this year. The ONS goes on to say that 56.3% of businesses made a purchase online during 2006. This indicates that businesses wanting to source new products or services for themselves are increasingly turning to the search-engines on the web rather than picking up a paper directory.

Most people when looking on the web for a new product or service turn to one of the top four search-engines, namely; Google, Yahoo Search, MSN or Ask to help them find it. Google which accounts for approximately 87% of the Internet searches made in the UK can be said to be the ‘search-engine of choice’ for the majority of Internet users.

Given the dominance of Google in the search engine world, it makes sense if your business maintains its own website and uses it as a promotional or sales tool, to firstly get it listed within Google’s database and then to get it placed as high as possible within its search results. This ‘placement’ process is called website ranking. Research has shown that Internet searchers rarely scroll onto page two of their given search results, so it’s important that your site is placed or ranked on the first page of Google’s results when a particular phrase is used as the search term. So for example if you are promoting “widgets for cars� on your website then to be successful your site should appear on page one of Google’s search results when the phrase “widgets for cars� is used as a search term.

The higher you get your site placed for search terms that are relevant to it, the more chance you’ll have of attracting a visitor to your site and in-turn, the more chance you will have of making a sale or generating an enquiry.

The process of preparing a website for ranking in the search-engines is called “Search Engine Optimisation� (SEO) and generally goes hand in hand with the process of “Search Engine Promotion� (SEP) which involves getting an “optimised� website included and then ranked, within the results pages of a particular search engine.

A correctly optimised website together with an effective search engine promotional strategy can pay dividends for its owner but can be time consuming and fraught with pitfalls for the unwary. However, with patience and commitment there is a lot the small business owner can do for themselves to promote their website in the search engines for very little or no cost.

To this end and through this column over the next few weeks, I’m going to look at the different aspects of search engine promotion that a business website owner can adopt for themselves in order to help them increase traffic levels to their website.

Jaimie Dobson is a director of Heckmondwike based digital marketing agency Keyclicks UK Ltd

Note: This original article by Jaimie Dobson was orignally published in the Business Matters section of The Weekly Press newspaper on the 27th June 2008

Choosing and using a strong domain name for your website can be the difference between success and failure for your site.

Your domain name can say a lot about who you are and what your business is all about and is the ‘location address’ for your website on the net. Compare the concept to a bricks ’n’ mortar business. If its location is poor, then it’s unlikely to get many visitors. The same is true for your website’s domain name.

With this in mind, here are the top tips for choosing a good domain name for your website.

1. Make it Memorable
Your domain name forms your website address (often called a URL) must be easy to remember. Whilst bookmarking a website is easy to do thus avoiding the need to remember website addresses, in reality many people don’t do it. As such, if people are going to remember your website address if they see it in your advertising or are verbally told it, then it should be easy to grasp.

Avoid overlay complex names and avoid initials unless they are really obvious. For example the initials in the domain ‘bbc.co.uk’ are very obvious in their meaning to most people, but unless your business has the brand recognition that the BBC enjoys, initials are best avoided.

2. Short and Sweet
The maximum characters you should use for a domain name is twenty. The shorter the better to be honest with many people saying 10 is the maximum to go for. Anything over this number can not only be difficult to remember, but can be misspelt.

3. Choose your Extension Wisely
The most common domain extensions in the UK are ‘.co.uk’ and ‘.com’ e.g. ‘keyclicks.co.uk’ Many other domain extensions are available e.g. .net, .org.uk, .tv, info, gov.uk etc. However, be aware, some domain extensions work better that others and are more memorable at the same time. It’s important to realise that some domain extensions also have restrictions. For example ‘gov.uk’ is restricted to government organisations whilst ‘.ac.uk’ domains are restricted to academic organisations such as universities.

The ‘must have’ domain extensions to get for your site are the .co.uk and the .com ones. If you can’t get either of these, it’s even worth renaming your website or even your company to fit in with a .com and .co.uk domain name pair that you can obtain.

If you can’t get the .com go for a .net but be prepared, as most people will try the .com domain before the .net when trying to guess your web address. So you could lose traffic to other websites.

The type of domain extension you use might also have an influence on the type of website you plan to operate. For example, some people have come to expect certain types of websites with certain domain extensions. For example ‘.org.uk’ extensions are used by UK based, non-profit organisations and ‘.net’ extensions are often used by technology or Internet related companies.

4. Spelling Rules KO
Having a difficult to spell domain name could land you in more trouble as a misspelt name could drive your visitor towards your competitor’s website. If you have a difficult to spell name, consider registering the possible misspellings of your main domain name and eventhe Americansied versions of the word if available. For example if your main domain is “thetyreshop.com” also register “thetireshop.com” if you can.

A good domain name contains only words that are easy to pronounce and spell with a good combination of words or letters that are used in everyday language and does not contain foreign words that may be difficult for a non-native speaker to use.

5. I Wanna Tell You a Story
Good domain names tell a story and are descriptive. In other words the domain you use should be directly relevant to your business and describe what it does.

One such method is to use your company name as we have done in ‘keyclicks.co.uk’ for our domain. The other angle is to use a phrase, not related to your company name; but one which describes what your business or website is all about. For example the domain ‘diy.com’ for the UK home improvements retail chain B&Q, is superb as it describes exactly what they do i.e. “do-it-yourself�, is short, easy to remember and is easy to spell and say. Yes, this domain does use initials, however the brand recognition of B&Q in the UK is so great, as is usage of the phrase ‘DIY’ in everyday English; they can get away with it.

6. Nothing Fancy
It’s never a good idea to use numbers or hyphens within a domain name. For a start many people don’t know what a hyphen is (incredible we know, but you’d be surprised), secondly people don’t pay attention to symbols and numbers cause confusion.

For example if your domain is “mywebsite4u.com�, when telling people this domain, you’ll need to make sure they understand that the ‘4’ is a number and not the word ‘four’. In otherwords you have to start explaining your domain which is always a bad sign. If you do wish to include numbers, register the alphabetical equivalent domain as well and point it to your website. i.e. “mywebsitefouryou.com� and also perhaps “mywebsiteforyou.com� in order to avoid confusion.

How crucial is your website to your business?

If the livelihood or the reputation of your business pivots upon the performance of your website, then no doubt your web hosting arrangements will be a critical factor for your business.

If you, like many of our clients run business critical websites such as high revenue e-commerce sites or reputation building corporate sites, then you’ll want to make sure your site’s web hosting is up to the mark.

Think of it like running an express train on a branch line. It’ll run but it won’t run to its full potential.

Rackspace Hosting is Here

To this end we’ve recently teamed up with Rackspace® in order offer business critical web hosting with a reputation for excellent support to its customers. Rackspace is one of Europe’s fastest growing hosting companies, delivering enterprise-level managed services to businesses around the world. Serving more than 14,000 customers in eight data centres worldwide, Rackspace integrates the industry’s best technologies for each customer’s specific need and delivers it as a service via the company’s award-winning Fanatical Support®.

Rackspace is totally focused and experienced in managing hosting solutions’ for its customers, from simple web servers to complex online applications and email solutions. They help their customers forget about their online infrastructure through providing Fanatical Support® for their hosted applications.

Fanatical Support is their unbeatable level of customer service. Rackspace employees are available 24/7/365 to meet and exceed customer’s expectations. Customers get fast responses to critical issues, unlimited technical phone support, access to our huge online knowledgebase, guaranteed 100% network uptime and many other business-critical support features. It might sound too good to be true, but it’s not. It is what happens when you Experience Fanatical Support from Rackspace.

By outsourcing our business critical hosting to Rackspace, our clients get the peace of mind that their site’s hosting environment is being looked after by the experts, whilst alleviating the pressure on their own IT team. The implementing, updating, troubleshooting, patching, monitoring, administering, backing up and storing, upgrading and every day support - all becomes their responsibility. Couple this with their Fanatical Support and you know that the hosting of your website will be taken care of by experts that have a unique passion to get things right for their customers.

More information about Rackspace may be found on their website at www.rackspace.co.uk

Upgrade to Fanatical Web Hosting

If you feel your site will benefit from of one of our Rackspace hosting accounts, firstly review the comparison below to judge if Rackspace hosting is right for your business and then simply instruct register your interest by dropping us a mail or calling us on 01924 400 530 and we’ll talk you through the benefits.

Some of our clients have noticed that the listing that Google has for their website in its results pages has a number of sub-links below its main entry on the results pages and have to come us to ask “What are these?�

These sub-links are in effect ‘short-cuts’ to pages deep within a website that Google has placed in its search results which allow users looking for your site, to link directly into the pages of your site without first going through the main entry page Google has listed for your site (more often than not this main entry page is your site’s Home Page).

Take a look at the screen-shot images above and below in this article, which illustrate the concept.

Google calls these sub-link short-cuts into the inner pages of your website, “Sitelinks� and defines them as:

“Sitelinks are additional links Google sometimes generates from site contents in order to help users navigate your site. Google generates these sitelinks periodically from your site’s contents. Because we generate sitelinks dynamically, this list can change from time to time.â€�

There’s no doubt that ‘Sitelinks’ are a useful enhancement to a website’s listing in Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) once they’ve been allocated ‘Sitelinks’ by Google. However because Sitelinks are generated automatically by Google’s algorithm (the complex mathematical formulae that Google uses to rank websites in its results), as a website owner there is little control over what can and can’t be displayed the Sitelinks listed for any particular website.

Furthermore, Google, like everything it does with respect to its search results: keeps it’s method of generating Sitelinks a secret in order to stop any one website dominating its search results. So it’s not as if you could drop them an email to ask them.

However Google does offer some background information on the subject of Sitelinks and how website owners can to some degree, control their display.

Take a look at their own blog at:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/09/information-about-sitelinks.html

and within the Webmaster Help Centre on its own site:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=47334&topic=8523

Researching the subject on the web through various SEO blogs and forums it seems that the consensus of opinion by experienced web marketers is that in order for a site to be allocated Sitelinks by Google, it generally has to satisfy a number of criteria, namely;

• The website is easily spiderable with a well structured navigation
• The site gets a good ranking with high levels of natural search traffic
• The site has a high click through rate (CTR) from the search results page
• The site presents useful outbound links
• There are many inbound links from high quality, 3rd party websites
• The website age is several years old

If you have a website, whether it’s ours or not and you feel that it’s ranking in Google could be improved, then get in touch for a free site evaluation.

Back in February 2008, which is not that long ago really, when we first launched this website; we took it upon ourselves to try and get it listed on the first page of Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for a whole raft of keyword phrases that relate to the services we provide and the principle geographical region that we target.

This is essentially Yorkshire and the area surrounding the city of Leeds.

As such, we set about researching a list of keywords and promoting our website against those keyword phrases with a view to getting it listed on page 1 of Google’s SERPs.

This is no mean task! Particularly in our industry which is not only crowded, but contains lots of companies, like us; that have a detailed knowledge and experience in the field of ‘search engine optimization’. Such ‘knowledgeable competition’ makes the job even harder than it normally would be if we were promoting any other type of business in the search engines.

Still, we’re always up for a challenge!

So four months on, here we are in June and how are we doing?

Well we’re pleased to say that out of the big long list of phrases that we initially came up with, a good chunk of them, listed below; place us on page 1 of Google’s SERPs – with many of the phrases putting us in position #1.

How cool is that?

Here’s the list:

creative graphic designers leeds
creative web designers leeds
graphic designers leeds
graphic designers yorkshire
Leeds web designers
logo design yorkshire
web design agency yorkshire
creative design agency leeds
creative design agency yorkshire
design company yorkshire
digital marketing agencies leeds
graphic design agency leeds
graphic design agency yorkshire
graphic design yorkshire
graphic designer leeds
graphic designer yorkshire
marketing agency leeds
uk design agency leeds
uk design agency yorkshire
web design agency leeds

However, let’s not get complacent here. Google is constantly refining what it puts on its SERPs so we need to continue working on these phrases and our site, so that we’re not only kept on page #1 but we’re kept moving upwards.

Similarly, of the phrases from our initial list that currently place us on page 2, 3 or 4 – we need to keep promoting. Placement on the SERPs of any search engine worth its salt, is a moveable feast, so the process of search engine optimization and search engine promotion needs to be constant.

Busy, busy, busy!