Dear [FIRSTNAME]

It's accepted that producing a web site is standard practice if you want to be in business. We all understand that prospective customers will either try and search out a new supplier or you will attempt to persuade the customer to look at your site by one means or another.

Over time however, the whole process has become more complex.

Your web site can become the second most important element of your business - the first being face-to-face contact.

The scope and reach of on-line interaction and integration is amazing and the financial implication is unusual, i.e. the software and set up costs are relatively tiny when comparing with the potential increase in sales and customer exposure.

However...no matter how much money you invest in your web site, if you can't get noticed, it will have been a complete waste of time.

In this edition, we have provided an overview of the required steps to consider to make sure you do get noticed...

Making It Easy For You
As mentioned in Part One, it’s important to determine what type of web site you’re presenting to your customers (i.e. e-commerce, corporate, support or lead generating).  This will pretty much dictate what type of software you use, for example, e-commerce would include a shopping cart and payment gateway like Paypal.

Whichever type you need, it’s worthwhile deciding early on if you want to update the information yourself or if you are going to leave it to a webmaster. If you intend to update your site in-house it would be wise to look at some Content Managed Sites (CMS) as these enable you to very quickly add or update articles/content.

For CMS software, take a look at www.joomla.org The software is free and there are 30 million users around the world!.

The important thing about your choice of software is to make sure that it has search engine optimisation (SEO) built in. This means that your content and page structure is visible to the search engines in such a way that it enhances the overall relevance of your information.

Note: what the search engine has to offer is its ability to deliver accurate results to you, the browser. Therefore, the more accurate the results, the more frequently you will use the search engine!

It stands to reason that everything about your content needs to fulfil certain criteria of the search engines if you want to be found. Without an amount of SEO work, your web site is invisible to browsers and is unidentifiable amongst millions of other sites. Mastering SEO is the same as waving a flag to get noticed.

What is a friendly page?
A search engine friendly (SEF) web page will conform to the following structure: a relevant page title, a page description, some key words, relevant content and an applicable web address (URL). This coding is hidden when looking at a web page.

If you’re unsure about what’s on your site, click on View Source and a second window will pop up and you will be able to view all of the coding applicable to your page:

• The Page Title displays in the blue bar across the top of screen and should be an accurate description of what your browser expects to be looking at.
• The description is the two line introduction text displayed by a search engine. This describes your page, it could be a home page or a content page
• Keywords or phrases that describe the content of your page.
• Search Engine Friendly URL’s

Depending on your web site software, a Search Engine Friendly (SEF) setting can be enabled that adapts the title of your page to a search engine friendly url. Make sure that each title is relevant to the content of the page.

Example: A web site selling brass bird cages for parrots; http://www.yoursite.com/birdcages/brass-bird-cage-for-your-parrot.htm. As you can see, the url can be quite specific.

To take a look at our top ten tips on search engine optimisation, please click here.

Getting Google Going
The general consensus is that Google have adapted their criteria slightly and now appear to place a higher weight on content rather than meta keywords (as above). Therefore it is suggested that the first twenty five and last twenty five words of the body text contain relevant content with the Page Title and the web address (url) also has some relevance to the content.

Another factor to consider is the number of links connecting to your site from other web sites. We cover this aspect a little later, but it is part of the mix that helps get you noticed.

There is so much speculation about what Google do or don’t do, however one thing you can be sure of, their criteria reflects what visitors or browsers actually want. So the more accurate and relevant your offering, the higher you will appear on the search engine rankings – and the greater likelihood you will attract more customers because you’re relevant to what they’re looking for.

Google Services
Set up a Google Account and follow the instructions for the following free services:

Web Site Analytics; will provide most of the data you will ever need to gauge the success of your site and search criteria. Simply copy the code generated by Google for your account on to any web page(s) you want to monitor and you can drill down to find out how many visitors have looked at your site, from which country including the town, the key words they used to find you, how long they stayed on your site and which specific page they looked at.

Web Site Optimizer; AB Split Testing; No one can be sure on day one that the best page is being displayed - so create two or three and let Google alternate them to your visitors.

As part of the process, you can set goals. This means if your call to action (what you want them to do) is for the visitor to click to another page and they do just that, bingo, you have achieved your goal. The goal is registered in analytics thereby helping you to make the decision as to which of the two or three pages should be used.

Web Master Tools; An essential resource to upload your xml site map, confirm your site exists and to review statistics.

Local Business Entry
If a browser searches for a service or product and includes a geographic location, a small map appears with a few lettered map pins. To get your company displayed simply log into Google and in many cases you can instantly get to the top of the Google search engine. Try it now. Look for telecoms suppliers in Hertfordshire - we're there, but so are a couple of companies in central London! It is an under-used resource and it's free.

Links & Relevance; If your information, titles, keywords and url's are relevant your will gain a good position in the search engines. If you are able to increase the links back to your site, then you will achieve a great position.

Site Maps; Once you have structured all of your pages to enable the search engines to register and index the content on your site, you will need to upload an xml site map to your public_html or home directory on your site.

Free software is available on line. Take as look at www.gsitecrawler.com if you don’t have a site map on your site.

Free Listings; Submit your site to as many free search engines and directory sites as possible. Simply search for free web site submissions on your chosen search engine and register away. Start with www.dmoz.org as they are the main registration for web sites.

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A final word...
I hope you have found the above information useful. I know its brief, however it gives you an insight into the areas you might need to consider. Get in first before your competition starts applying these techniques - and if you need any more information or advice, call 0800 970 9751, we're here to help.

To your success...Bye for now

Nigel Maine - Senior Partner

Footnote: If you wanted to improve your bottom line would you increase your income or reduce your costs? Whatever you decide for your business, we'll help make it a success by adjusting your costs and recommending automated solutions that will generate more income.  No confusion, no stress, just straightforward advice that allows you to enjoy the rewards....