Do You Make Money Online

DIY Website Part 2.

There are some important choices that need to be made before even buying a domain name for a website. Having a solid strategy from the outset will save a great deal of time and will increase the chances of getting results. Firstly one needs to consider exactly what the purpose of the website is.

If the company has a strong local brand then it might be a good idea to build a strategy around the company itself. This gives existing customers and prospects who have heard of the company, easy access to information and a point of contact. However if the website is to attract new customers and the company brand in not well known the structure of the website will need to be quite different.

When a website is to attract new customers it is essential that one first
understands how people use the internet and how the search engines determine their results. The web is still used more as a place to find information than to shop. Although many people do shop online even more go online to find information and then go out and shop as a result of their research. On the face of it this can make it difficult to fully assess the effectiveness of the website. However there are tools and techniques that can be used to take a lot of the guess work out of it. Using a good traffic counter that has analytic capabilities can help, as can running a system where a coupon can be printed from the website offering a small discount on redemption at purchase.

Getting targeted traffic to a small business website can be achieved in a number of ways, but free traffic (organic traffic) should always be the focus when planning. When planning a strategy to attract new customers it is a good idea to think about what a person would search for if they were looking for your product or service. Each time a search is carried out the search engine has the task of returning all relevant results. The results also have to be returned in order of relevance and importance to the term searched for. Search engines such as Google do this with incredible efficiency.

Understanding a little about how the search engines do this allows us to set up our pages accordingly. Organic traffic should be the very first consideration when planning a website. As Google holds the largest share of the search engine market it is best to do some research and base the strategy on Googles results. Let us now look at some simple  techniques that can be adopted to research possible search terms and weigh up the strength of the competition. Through lack of understanding most small business websites are built around the company name regardless of the company’s brand strength. This is possibly the single most common mistake among small business websites.

To demonstrate why this is not good practice let us assume that we are tasked with planning and building a website for a local company that supplies and fits kitchens. The company is called Cosy kitchens and they are based in the city of Canterbury in the UK.

When a search is carried out the search engine uses a number of things to
determine the relevance of a page to the term searched for. Some of the more important aspects of our page are the url or domain name, page title, description, the page content and keywords. These are all things that we have complete control over and can be carefully set up to maximise our chances of gaining a high search result position.

Knowing this we need to first consider the domain name itself. If the company brand is strong and using the example above the domain name cosykitchens.co.uk would probably be the first choice. However this is not often the case and if we take this route the only people likely to find us are people who have searched for the term “cosy kitchens”.

Looking at our company again it is likely that people living in and around Canterbury and looking for a local kitchen supplier/fitter would search a term like “kitchens Canterbury” or “Canterbury kitchens”. With that in mind it would be a good idea to choose a domain name like canterburykitchens.co.uk. This coupled with some on page optimisation (covered later) gives us a much better chance of landing on the front page of the search results.

We could have perhaps considered kitchens.com, but that is a very broad term and would put us in competition with every web page that contains the word kitchen. Adding the word Canterbury reduces our competition right down and the pages with both words will appear above those with only the word kitchen. Of course there are a number of other factors that also influence the result. Having said that a good choice of domain name and careful page optimisation have at times been enough to land websites that I have built in the top five on Google within a couple of weeks of going online.

It is a reasonable assumption that only a handful of people are likely to search “Canterbury Kitchens” each week. Of those who do maybe only one will make an enquiry and of those only a percentage may buy. Because the keyword Canterbury is included in the domain name it is possible to add pages that extend on the range of search terms that can be targeted.

Let us now look at some simple techniques that can be adopted to research possible search terms and weigh up the strength of the competition. Through lack of understanding most small business websites are built around the company name regardless of the company’s brand strength. This is possibly the single most common mistake among small business websites.

To demonstrate why this is not good practice let us assume that we are tasked with planning and building a website for a local company that supplies and fits kitchens. The company is called Cosy kitchens and they are based in the city of Canterbury in the UK.

When a search is carried out the search engine uses a number of things to determine the relevance of a page to the term searched for. Some of the more important aspects of our page are the url or domain name, page title, description, the page content and keywords. These are all things that we have complete control over and can be carefully set up to maximise our chances of gaining a high search result position.

Knowing this we need to first consider the domain name itself. If the company brand is strong and using the example above the domain name cosykitchens.co.uk would probably be the first choice. However this is not often the case and if we take this route the only people likely to find us are people who have searched for the term “cosy kitchens”.

Looking at our company again it is likely that people living in and around Canterbury and looking for a local kitchen supplier/fitter would search a term like “kitchens Canterbury” or “Canterbury kitchens”. With that in mind it would be a good idea to choose a domain name like canterburykitchens.co.uk. This coupled with some on page optimisation (covered later) gives us a much better chance of landing on the front page of the search results.

We could have perhaps considered kitchens.com, but that is a very broad term and would put us in competition with every web page that contains the word kitchen. Adding the word Canterbury reduces our competition right down and the pages with both words will appear above those with only the word kitchen. Of course there are a number of other factors that also influence the result. Having said that a good choice of domain name and careful page optimisation have at times been enough to land websites that I have built in the top five on Google within a couple of weeks of going online.

It is a reasonable assumption that only a handful of people are likely to search “Canterbury Kitchens” each week. Of those who do maybe only one will make an enquiry and of those only a percentage may buy. Because the keyword Canterbury is included in the domain name it is possible to add pages that extend on the range of search terms that can be targeted.

Each search result consists of 3 elements. The title shown in blue followed by the description in black and then the url in green. The example above shows an additional section underneath each result in pale blue. This is a plug-gin that gives information about the web pages returned and will be discussed shortly.

Looking at the standard elements of the search the words Hastings and Bathroom are bold in the title, description and the url. When the page was set up it was very deliberately put into these 3 elements of the page and also its keywords and the page content.

The pale blue section of information underneath each result gives us some very important information that is essential to determining the chance of a high search results position.

In the top left corner of the picture below (#4) represents the overall position of the web page in the results. Next and very important is (PR:3) this is the page rank of the page. Page rank runs from zero to ten, ten being the highest. Our example below has a page rank of 3. The most important factors in the page rank are the content of the site and its link
popularity.

When a website has many incoming links it is seen as popular and important, this has a significant effect on page rank. However although the number of links is important, the quality of those links is more so. There are numerous examples of websites with hundreds of links and no page rank.

The number of incoming links to the website is shown throughout the example above and shows the number of links from sites like twitter and links from the Yahoo link domain. In the example above (y! Links) shows that there are currently 578 links coming into the website from the Yahoo link domain. Some links carry a lot of weight back to a web page and others can have little if any value. Some can even be detrimental to the page, but we will look at this subject a little later.

Not all of the information returned is relevant to us, but one that we should touch on before we move on is (Alexa). The Alexa rating of a website is another important factor in the websites strength. The lower the number shown in the Alexa rating the better.

The tool described above is a plug-gin for the FireFox web Browser and can be downloaded for free here. The plug-gin itself is called SEO Tools for FireFox. This is also a free tool and can be downloaded here.

The general rule of thumb is to avoid taking on websites with a page rank higher than 3.  This rule can be broken under certain conditions, but if your chosen phrase returns results that have several websites high up with a page rank higher than 3 you will have your work cut out.

There are exceptions to this rule. For instance if the number one position was held by a site with a page rank of 4, but the keyword is not present in the title you have a better chance. Understanding when and when not to take on a stronger website takes a little practice. For that reason it is better to take on sites with a page rank of 3 or less, preferably less.

If the results returned have a single site at the top with a high page rank and the rest are all very low this will be worth perusing. Although the number 1 position would be better, second or third place will still yield traffic with a well written title and description.

To further explore our competitors we can also carry out advanced search techniques
such as exact phrase, intitle and inurl searches.

Once armed with the information and knowledge that has been learned and established so far it is time to re consider our needs. One should take a moment to consider again who  will build and manage the website. If the website is to be relatively simple, then building it  will be simple. If however the business has a wide range of products that you want to sell  online then you may need to think about outsourcing. Outsourcing can be done either  totally or in part. There are online store set-up specialists services  and user friendly  shopping cart creators such as Coffee Cup Shopping Cart Creator.  Selling a smaller range  of products can be managed easily through services such as PayPal.

Whether you build your own website or not, doing the research that has been covered so far will be of great benefit to you or your developer. A developer can obviously do this research, but no one knows a business like its owner/manager. Being able to collaborate effectively with your developer will be beneficial to them, to you and to the business.

NEXT – Building The Website.