Fact: content is the most important thing about your website.
What is meant by “content”?
Everything on the site that a person browsing your site can see and read - all the words, the images, the titles, and the navigation links.
 

Overview
People (hopefully your customers) won’t be interested in your site unless the content is:

• interesting and relevant.
• accurate and up-to-date.
• well written (good English).

They won’t return to read it a second time unless it’s obvious that the content is regularly updated, and added to. It’s Continue Reading »

Anyone who has a business website naturally wants to get more revenue from it. That means having people find it from google and yahoo searches. So of course, it’s desirable to rank higher for the search phrases relevant to you.

That means it can be financially viable to spend money to “optimise” your website pages. And, it is possible, you can do things which will influence where they rank.

But let’s take a step back, and look at Google and Yahoo. What do they want to happen when someone does a search?

They want the results to be good quality and relevant to what the person searched for. They want:

1. Sites which are properly constructed and readable
2. Sites which target the region the searcher is in (geographically)
3. Sites which seem good because they are linked to by what seems to other “authoritative” sites 
4. Information which is obviously highly relevant to what you searched for.
5. Sites which have more than one page about the subject.
6. Sites which are up to date and frequently add new content.
7. Sites which have got some history 

They dont want the results to: Continue Reading »

In November 2007 BT launched a major online area which I think will be an important asset for businesses http://blog.bttradespace.com/tips-and-tricks/create-a-community-for-your-bu.php

If you are interested in marketing online, this is the sort of thing you need to get involved in - for 2 reasons:

1. As a direct marketplace - this is somehwere to meet supplieres and customers.
2. As an indirect marketing tool. This is a very good example of the sort of thing that is good for the popularity of your site. Its a chance to particpate in online communities, join networks, and get your name out there.

Many companies who try to get involved in Internet Marketing go down the route of typical search engine optimisation techniques, and do things like buy links to their site,  or create a blog,just for the sake of it.  Thats increasing ly sen to b ethe wrong way to do things. Good internet markeing pays good search engine dividends - what google and yahoo want are websites that are genuinely active and participating in relevant online communities.

Tradespace incorporates both an area to advertise, and a community area, which at the moment is a bit empty, but I’m sure will soon fill up.

BT tradeplace looks like it will be the sort of place to kill two birds with one stone! -If you have some time to kill over the Christmas holidays, get a free account.

If you have a website and more than one domain name for that website, there are some important issues that need managed. If you don’t, it can mess up your search engine ranking.

How will it mess me up - why should I be concerned about this?

If you have lots of domain names pointing to the same site, the Google PR can end up being shared around each of them, so none of them rank very well. You want the PR to go to one domain name.
Google ranks local websites higher for local searches. One of the ways it knows you are a local website is if you have a local domain name, like .co.uk But that domain name has to be correctly associated to the website.

There are three scenarios to consider:

1. You already own a generic domain name like .com or .net (called a TLD) and you buy a new county code domain name like .co.uk or .ie (called a ccTLD) to get better rankings in your target geographic market.
2. You already own a ccTLD, but you want a more prestigious .com domain name to add to your stable.
3. You buy up various other domain names, which you like, or are similar to your main one, and you want them to point to your website.

How to manage the scenarios:

Scenario 1

What is required here is to park the ccTLD on the TLD and get a link using the ccTLD to an appropriate page on the TLD

Scenario 2

What is required here is to 301 redirect the TLD to the ccTLD

Scenario 3

What is required here is an IP funnel. This is a “feeder site” with a 301 redirect to the main site, with all the other domain names parked on the feeder site.
So if you own a website with more than one domain name its really important to manage the domains. following the guidelines above.

Introduction 

Email can be a very useful tool for marketing to your existing customers and new ones. Its quick and theres no delivery costs. In fact it can be one of the cheapest and easiest forms of marketing there is. There are different ways to do it, ranging from your desktop email client, like MS Outlook, to professional email marketing services or software.

So how do you go about it, and what do you need to know?

To many people its simple - just write an email in Outlook and send it to all the customers in your contacts list. If you want to buy in more contacts, simply import those into Outlook and away you go. Whats the big deal?

Well one thing that has to be explained to start with is the problem with mass emailing from your usual email client, whether its Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird or whatever.

Why not use Outlook?

 The problem isnt so much Outlook as where your email goes after Outlook. Your email going out gets sent to a computer (the Outgoing SMTP server) which relays it on. Continue Reading »

What ownership rights does a customer have over their website.

IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) of a website is not quite as  straightforward as you might imagine!

There are 2 main areas to consider:

Site Content

This is covered by copyright law. Copyright is automatic in the UK. Unlike some other forms of intellectual property right, you don’t have to apply for it and there’s no register of copyright holders. In practice, however, it can be difficult to enforce legally. It’s a good idea to mark your work with the international copyright symbol © followed by your name and the year of creation. We include this for you.

Its very easy for someone to copy the design of your website, and copy the content, including the images. In reality the biggest deterrent to someone copying your website is not the law, but Google. Google’s search engines will usually detect and not list (or list lower) duplicate (older) content.

If you use images on your website, you need to be sure you have the right to use them.  Taking images from another website is not legal, or fair. Images that we supply are sourced from stock image retailers and typically includes the non-exclusive rights to use the image on your website or printed media, but not the right to re-sell it. If you require otherwise, that can be arranged

Site Code 

If you pay to have a website developed, you will own any code that was specifically developed for you. That however leaves a lot of components of a functioning website that may be required to make it work, that you dont “own”. An example is the database software (typically MySQL) that may be used in connection with your site.

So for example if you use our site -builder tool, you will have not paid for code to be developed (which is why it is low-cost), so all you own is the site content.

Useful links

DTI advice on copyright

Advice on outsourced code 

Complete guide to IP (UK govt)

Its important to keep your website content up to date. You need to edit it, add to it and constantly review it. Why should you do this?

1. New clients will notice if dates on the site are old, or if there is irrelevant information. Fresh content rightly gives the impression that your are a live, active opertion.
2. Existing customers won’t revisit your site if the content never changes.  
3. One important fact is that Google rates sites higher if they change regularly. If you are interested in improving your sites performance is search engines, you need fresh content.

  Continue Reading »

This post is all about taking online payments from customers.

This is an area which can cause a lot of confusion, so I hope to simply things a bit.

There are two different starting points:

1. You currently can process credit card transactions - you have a “merchant account” and a PDQ machine.
2. You havent got a “merchant account” (and cant, or dont want to endure the delay of getting one)

Continue Reading »