5 Reasons to use a professional website developer

Today I want to discuss the importance of using a professional website developer, I have encountered many businesses who either use a family member or friend, someone they know (maybe a student studying IT or Website development), attempt to build the website themselves or use what we call an ‘off the shelf’ package. None of these methods will produce a website that will be technically or visually as good as one made by a professional website developer.

1. The first and most obvious reason is Expertise – A good web developer should build a cleanly coded website and include a minimum amount of essential SEO on the website. As they work in the industry they will have knowledge of and understand the latest technologies and trends that are happening (i.e. Twitter, Blogs etc) and be able to advise you on how they could benefit your business.

2. The next reason is that a professionally designed website is virtually always much better visually than a non professionally designed website (though obviously some people do have a good creative eye and will be able to design a beautiful website). It is important to remember that your website is a window on your business, many people will visit your website and form an opinion of your business based on your website: amature website = amature business. No matter how good an impression you make when you meet this person they will review your website and this will partly form their opinion of your business.

3. As mentioned, some people will opt for an off the shelf/Out of a box packages which will require the website to conform to set features or a set frame work that has been pre-built into the package, no matter how much freedom these packages claim to offer the user you will still have to work within some form of frame work, where as using a website developer means complete freedom of design and functionality.

4. Another issue faced when not using a professional website developer is that little or no support is available. If a friend or someone you know has built your website in their spare time, then when something needs updating or maintenance is required it will be done when this person has the time. A professional website developer has an invested interest in making sure your website is live and up-to-date as it reflects their work and will probably be in their portfolio so potential clients could be looking at any one of the websites they have built. Worse still, if you have bought an ‘off the shelf’ solution there will certainly be no invested interest in you or your business as you are just another anonymous user, through using a professional website developer you can develop a personal relationship with them and a good developer will inform you of any business opportunities they see for you and other clients, either through networking and collaboration or through adding additional or the newest, latest features to your website.

5. The final reason is it will ultimately be cheaper, amature a website can cost your business money through missing out on business. If you are lucky enough to have the ability to build your own website, your time would surely be better invested in running your own business and potentially earning money. Also if you have an off the shelf package, although it may be cheaper in the 1st year, over 2 or more years it likely to cost more: Off the shelf packages usually range from £10 – £30 a month or more.

A final thought, imagine someone informing you that they were going to do what your business offers themselves, do you believe that they would be able to do the work to the same standard that a company specialising in that industry would be able to offer?

Tags: getting higher in Google, improve website ranking, Improving Google rankings, website, website design, website development, Websites

Links – Generating Backlinks

Generating Links in the Blogging World

I’ve spoken about linking in previous posts, it’s in my top 5 SEO tips and I’ve spoken about the annoyance of spam, but the Internet is made up of links and it is essential. We all now that generating links to our website or blog will have a huge influence on traffic and search engine results and usually with my Web developer hat on I would recommend contacting customers and suppliers and anyone else you know with a business to see if you can get a link, though it is important that the website linking to yours is relevant (hence customers and suppliers) or you can look for businesses working in the same industry which can link to you, my ideal example is the wedding industry, it’s made up of so many different parts which don’t necessarily compete with each other. So assuming you’ve exhausted this route and have all the links your going to generate you turn to your blog and it can be a powerful tool.

One of the excellent things about a blog is the way in which it is structured means that it creates loads of internal links when you post, and it helps to create pages quickly almost everything you create on your blog, be it a post or category, or using the archive or calendar feature, they all help create unique pages so if you had enough material to blog daily you could create 365 posts, if these went into 30 categories was part of your monthly archive and you had a tag cloud active on your site well I’m sure it would generate nearly 500 pages! All of which will have an effect on your search engine rankings.

Having hundreds of internal links is great but how do you use the blog to generate incoming links? Well you need to get into the world of blogging, research bloggers in your industry or field, or even just blogs your interested in, take the time to read them and then comment on them, but only if you have something to say, I’m sure they will be interested in who commented on their blog and visit your blog, but by leaving a comment you have left a link back to your site. Hopefully by writing good relevant comments you will generate interest in your blog and bring readers in, but better still if they read your blog and like it they will recommend your blog to others and then the world of word of mouth marketing takes over.  Think about it, if you could comment on a blog a week, that’s 52 blogs a year, now imagine they have a strong readership of say 100 each that’s 5200 people who will see your comment, not say only 10% of those people take an interest in your blog it’s 520 visitors, now what if half of those visitors went away and recommended your blog via their blog – that 260 in bound links plus your original 52 which is 312 links, not I know this is a lot of what ifs – but by being a proactive member of the blog community you can reap the benefits and contribute some value to it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to read some of my favourite blogs and hopefully be able to make some comments on them

Tags: blogging for beginners, getting higher in Google, Improving Google rankings, Number 1 in Google, SEO

Keyword Research

• Yahoo Panama Keyword Tool
• Google Keyword Tool, traffic estimator, Webmaster Tools; Google Suggest and Google Trends
• MSN Keyword Forecast
• Hitwise
• WordTracker
• Keyword Discovery
• WordStream

One of the mistakes people make when conducting keyword research is targeting highly competitive keywords, I’m not saying that these keywords shouldn’t be used but when considering the size of your website and business and the competition in your industry there maybe better keywords to target. It is also worth noting that it is generally believed that when someone searches online if the keyword is a broad keyword, say, compact digital cameras, then they are browsing or researching the market, they are not looking to buy, but if the keyword is more precise, say Sony T77 compact camera, then the searcher is looking for a specific product and is more likely to have intentions of buying.

Some businesses or industries may also benefit from including their geographical location with their keywords, ‘homes for rent’ isn’t going to get you as many conversions as ‘homes for rent in Cardiff’ but this depends on your business, if you can trade internationally then you may be loosing out on business by including your location, but if your goods or services are generally location dependent then include it in your keywords.

When it comes to keywords, the one with the highest search volume isn’t necessarily going to be the one that lands you top spot in Google or gets you the highest conversions and it might be worth targetting a handful of keywords with a lower search volume but are more likely to be converted into sales.

Tags: getting higher in Google, Improving Google rankings, Keyword, keyword research, search engine optimisation, SEO

Top 5 SEO tips

SEO is a hot topic, has been for a long time and there are many suggestions on the best SEO techniques, weather your a web developer, SEO consultant or a business owner, the following 5 tips can be used to plan or optimise your website.

1. Content
2. Links (incoming, internal & Page rank)
3. URL’s (title and navigation)
4. Tags – meta, alt and H tags
5. Clean Code – HTML
6. Statistics – Webmaster and Analytics

The eagle eyed will have spotted 6 points above, and the title is 5 SEO tips – well number 6 isn’t really an SEO tip, but an essential part to measuring your success.

1 – Content

There’s a saying with websites and SEO – Content is King – this is the all important number one tip, get your content right, it can sometimes be challenging to write content for certain websites, and another danger is that the content becomes to long, in-depth or even waffles and this detracts from your main sales message. I personally believe that a website will always benefit from as much quality content as possible, but don’t force it on your visitors, or make them trawl through masses of content, a clear logical navigation system should allow them and the search engine spiders to find your content if desired. 

The manner in which your content is written is important as well, quite often people try to force home their keyword and this can make the copy unreadable, it is important to have a planned keyword/phrase that runs through the site, but remember ultimately your target audience is your customers not the search engines and the goal of a search engine is to deliver the best content to its user when conducting a search, so good content will be rewarded.

You will also be rewarded if you regularly add content, I appreciate that this can be tricky and some would say it is one of the reason behind many companies blogging as it allows you to quickly add content relevant to your business, but generally larger websites are more successful than smaller ones – ever found the answer to your search (the top result) on a 3 page website?

2-Links (incoming, internal & Page rank)

The second rule for successful SEO is linking, incoming links are hugely influential on search engine results, Google openly said that it treats a link from one site to another as a vote from one site for the other. So incoming links are going to help boost your website and incoming links from websites with a good page ranking will provide an even bigger boost. The text used in the link is also important, an ideal incoming link would come from a site with a high google page rank and would contain the keyword of your website which is also the keyword of the page it was linking too, not an easy task, but worth the effort. But a word of warning, don’t go out there and get as many links as you possibly can as in my opinion some can have a negative impact, make sure that the link source is a respectable website and not a link farm and better still is relevant to your business or industry – I always use the wedding industry as an ideal example, there are many parts to the wedding industry and not all compete directly with each other, so if a group of businesses which all provide services to weddings came together and link to each other they would all benefit, the dress maker, the wedding cake maker, the car hire company, the venue etc etc

The other part of linking is internal links, that is links within your website, one of my pet hates is the basic ‘click here’ link – if you search for ‘click here’ in google Adobe comes out on top as the classic link is ‘click here’ to download adobe reader. When you provide a link within your website you have made it clear where that link will take the user if followed, so make it more clear and get some bonus points from search engines by including the keyword, 

Click here for SEO tips�
isn’t as good as
Click here for SEO tips 

Its a very simple difference but one that will gain you additional points in the SEO race. Remember use your keyword in your link (that is the keyword of the destination page) and in the url as discussed in point 3.

3-URLs (Title and Navigation)

Another simple but important tip is to use your keyword in the url, if your page is focused around seo then name it seo.html or search-engine-optimisation.html, it helps to reaffirm the focus of the page, the keyword that it is based around, if we consider point 2 above and combine it with point 3 a hyperlink from a page which features seo and that then links to a page which includes seo in the url, well hopefully it is clear that this is much better than a ‘click here’ link to webpage7.

The age of a URL is also recognised, it is believed to gain authority over its life time and will contribute towards achieving good rankings, unfortunately unless your lucky enough to purchase a domain with authority this is something that simply takes time and patience, I have heard stories of urls with high authority being sold for thousands of pounds, but unless it was essential to your business I personally believe that there is a lot more you could do with that money.

4-Tags – meta, alt and H tags

There was a time when web developers loaded these with keywords and some even used fake keywords which meant that search engines returned inaccurate results, so the search engines decided not to use tags, but in time they have began to include them when ranking a website. The important part of SEO is to have a keyword running through the site, from the link which brings you to the site, through the content, within the url and within the tags, the meta tags are the title tag (the tag which appears at the very top of the browser) the meta description tag, this is often a snap shot of the page and can appear as the short descriptive paragraph when search engines return results and the meta keywords, which as simply the keywords relating to the page, I believe that you should put these in order of most important to least important.  The alt tags relate to images, these are the alternative tags for when an image doesn’t appear or the descriptive tags for screen readers, I would recommend that again the image relate to the page content and so the alt tag will also relate to the page content as it will describe the image and its relevance to the page, a bonus tip here is to give the image an appropriate name, seo-technique-1.gif is better than untitledimage1.gif right? The H tags are the Header tags, these will usually be a title or header to a page introducing the content and again will likely have the keyword within it, it is believed that Search Engines give content within H tags a slightly higher rating or score than the rest of the body. 

5-Clean Code – HTML

The final tip is to keep your code as clean as possible, I know that as a web developer sometimes code can become messy or cluttered when using some java scripts to achieve a visual effect, this is a choice between delivering the cleanest code possible but at the sacrifice of user experience or providing a more impressive and pleasing user experience at the expense of clean code. But if you can always bear in mind that the cleaner your code is the more apparent your keyword will be and hopefully the more successful your website will be.

 6-Statistics – Webmaster and Analytics

This isn’t really a SEO tip but is essential, if you implement all the above advice on your website then I know you will get improved results, but how will you see them or measure them, I’m sure you will hopefully have an increase in enquiries or sales, but hard figures are always good to review. I’m a big fan of Google and install the webmaster tool and analytics on all my websites, both tools allows me and my clients to view the keywords and position obtained when searches are conducted. They also provide you with information on your incoming links, which pages are linked to, which pages are viewed and so much more.  This really is an essential part of any website as it allows you to easily asses how your website is performing.

Tags: getting higher in Google, getting top spot in Google, improve website ranking, Number 1 in Google, SEO, top 5 seo tips