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Frequently asked questions and website articles
I'm not sure if I really need a website. It's all so complicated and I don't understand it. I have more business now than I can cope with. You can also use the Internet to reduce your running costs eg: why not send out your customers accounts using email instead of incurring paper and postage costs, not to mention the time spent stuffing envelopes. It takes a while to fully appreciate the benefits of the Internet. Don't wait for your competitors to get there first! My customers like things the way they are. They're not even
using the Internet. Also in the very near future New Zealanders will be able to access the Internet through their televisions. This will mean that even more people will want access to your products and services. Worldwide, trade over the internet in 2002 was $US2.3 billion, and is expected to reach $US3.9 billion this year. In Europe, internet sales over Christmas were up 86% over last year. These figures can't be ignored. The Internet doesn't have a lot to offer a business like mine. It seems less personal to do business over the Internet. Technology always costs so much and then it doesn't work properly. What happens if I decide I don’t want my website anymore? I am already on the Online Yellow Pages, why should I have
a site with you? The advantage of having your own web site is that you can market on the Yellow Pages site and then anywhere else you want to by registering with search engines. What about Overseas Search Engines?
I've decided that I want a website, so here are a few technical questions. What is website hosting? Why don't I get website hosting with my domain name? Should I get a "co.nz" or a ".com" domain name? Can I get email with my domain name? What makes a good website? Think about why you want or need a website. Spy on your competition. Put everything together in a brief. Contact some web designers. Work in stages. Be professional. Help your website. Web Copy – How Much is Enough? These days, there’s widespread acceptance that a website is an integral part of the marketing plan of any business. Likewise, it’s commonly accepted that web copy is a vital component of any website. But how much web copy is enough? The pure volume of information available on the Internet is daunting – often counterproductive. There are approximately 550 billion documents on the web, and every day another 7 million are added. According to an A.T. Kearney, Network Publishing study (April 2001), workers take so long trying to find information that it costs organizations $750 billion annually! Yet people continue to use it. Information gathering is the most common use of the Internet (American Express survey, 2000). And it seems work-related searches are amongst the most common, with 48% of people using the Internet to find work-related information, as opposed to 7% who use magazines (Lyra Research, 2001). Interestingly, however, the average person visits no more than 19 websites in the entire month in order to avoid information overload (Nielsen NetRatings in Jan 2001). So how do you ensure your site is one of those 19? How do you make your content helpful without making it overwhelming? That’s what this article is about… Here are 5 quick rules of thumb to help you decide how much is enough. 1) Know your audience (Reader or Search Engine?) Think about whether you’re targeting human readers (potential customers) or search engines. This must always be one of your very first questions, as the answer will determine your approach to content. In general, human readers think less is more. Search engines, on the other hand, think more is more (well, more or less…). In many ways, it comes down to a question of quality versus quantity. Human readers are interested in quality, whereas search engines are interested quantity. Human readers want you to answer their questions and make it clear how you can benefit them. And they don’t want to wade through volumes of text. Search engines want a high word count, full of relevant keywords, and short on diagrams. You need to think carefully about your audience. In most cases, it’ll be a trade-off. A high search engine ranking is important (or at least beneficial) to most businesses, so a happy medium is required. The following tips will go some way toward providing this balance. 2) Make it concise Say everything you need to say, but always ask, “Can I say it with fewer words?” The literary world may be impressed by complex writing, but visitors aren’t. Keep it simple, and keep it brief. Your home page shouldn’t be more than 1 screen long. In other words, visitors shouldn’t have to scroll. Subsequent pages can be longer, but try to keep them to a maximum of about 300-400 words each (approximately 1 scroll). A lot of people will tell you that you also need 300-400 words or more on your home page for a good search engine ranking. You don’t. If you focus on the right keywords and generate a lot of links to your site, you can achieve a high ranking without losing your readers’ interest by padding. TIP: For most businesses, a good rule of thumb is to make it conversational. The old school oppose conversational copy; don’t listen to them. Unless you’re writing for an old-school audience, feel free to write as people talk. 3) One subject per page On this, both readers and search engines agree. Don’t try and squeeze too much information onto a single page. For example, instead of trying to detail all of your products on a single Products page, use the page to introduce and summarize your product suite, then link to a separate page per product. This way, your content will be easier to write, your readers won’t be overwhelmed, and you’ll be able to focus on fewer keywords (so the search engines will get a clearer picture of what you do). 4) Make it scannable According to a 1998 Sun Microsystems study, reading from a monitor is 25% slower than reading from paper. As a result, 79% of users scan read when online. So make sure you accommodate scanning. Use headings and sub-headings. Highlight important words and sections. Use bulleted lists and numbered lists. Use tables. Use statistics. Use meaningful indenting. Use short sentences. Most importantly, be consistent in your usage. Oh… and follow rules 2 and 3 above. 5) Use a simple menu structure Try to keep your high-level menu (Home, About Us, Contacts, Products, Services, etc.) to a maximum of about 10 items (5-8 is ideal). If you have too many options, your site will seem unstructured and your visitors won’t know where to start. In order for a visitor to want to come back to your site, they need to feel comfortable when they’re there. They need to know what to expect. If they can’t identify any logic in your menu structure, they will always feel lost. What’s more, this lack of structure will reflect badly on your business. The Internet can be an incredibly cost-effective form of promotion because the cost per word to publish is so low. Don’t be fooled into thinking more is more just because it costs less. Audiences – even search engines – don’t want everything; they just want enough. Happy writing! Reproduced with thanks to Glenn Murray who is an advertising copywriter and heads copywriting studio Divine Write. Visit www.divinewrite.com for further details. Increase your search engine ranking The methods employed to increase your search engine rankings may seem like rocket science to you, so you have probably avoided dealing with this issue. I am here to tell you - the time has come to face your website! A high search engine ranking for your website is so essential that if you have the slightest desire to actually succeed in your business, there is no way you can continue to avoid this issue. At least 91% of people looking for goods and services on the Internet find websites through search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The idea of optimizing your pages for high search engine rankings is to attract targeted customers to your site who will be more than likely to make a purchase. The higher your page comes up in search engine results, the greater the traffïc that is directed to your website. That's what search engine optimization is about. You can immerse yourself in all the technical information available online to figure out how to optimize your web pages to achieve higher rankings. Or you can look at a few simple items on your pages, make some small adjustments, and most likely see improved rankings quite rapidly. The first item you should examine is the title bar on your homepage. The title bar is the colored bar at the top of the page. Look at the words that appear there when you access your home page. To increase search engine rankings, the words on your homepage's title bar should include the most important keywords or phrases, one of which would include your company name. Then clïck on all your links and examine the title bars on the pages you access. Each title bar on every single page of your site should contain the most important keywords and phrases taken from the page itself. However, avoid very long strings of keywords, keeping them to six words or less. Avoid repeating keywords more than once in the title bars, and make sure that identical words are not next to each other. [ Check what are the most common key words people use to find services like yours. Go to www.overture.com. Click on "Visit the Resource Centre", then "Keyword Selector Tool". ] The next item to put under your microscope is your website content. Search engines generally list sites that contain quality content rather than scintillating graphics. The text on your site must contain the most important keywords - the words that potential customers will be typing into search engines to find your site. Aim to have around 250 words on each page, but if this is not desirable due to your design, aim for at least 100 carefully chosen words. If you want to achieve a high ranking on search engines, this text is essential. However, the search engines must be able to read the text, meaning that the text must be in HTML and not graphic format. To find out if your text is in HTML format, take your cursor and try to highlight a word or two. If you are able to do this, the text is HTML. If the text will not highlight, it is probably in graphic format. In this case, ask your webmaster to change the text into HTML format in order to increase your search engine rankings. Next we come to what is called meta tags. I know this sounds like something out of science fiction, but it is really just simple code. Many people believe that meta tags are the key to high search engine rankings, but in reality, they only have a limited effect. Still, it's worth adding them in the event that a search engine will use meta tags in their ranking formula. To find out if your page is set up with meta tags, you must access the code. To do this, clïck the "view" button on the browser menu bar, and select "source." This will pull up a window revealing the underlying code that created the page. If there are meta tags, they usually appear near the top of the window. For example, a meta tag would read: meta name="keywords" content=. If you do not find code that reads like this, ask your webmaster to put them in. This may not do much for your search engine rankings, but any little boost helps. Lastly, we come to the issue of link popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in terms of search engine rankings. Almost all search engines use link popularity to rank your website. Link popularity is based on the quality of the sites you have linked to from your links page. If you visit Google and type in "link:" (without the quotations) followed by your site address (no space after the colon), you will be shown the sites that are linked to your site as per Google. Example link:www.yoursite.com. Note that searching link:yoursite.com will return different results than searching link:www.yoursite.com . To find your site's link popularity on other search engines search the phrase "free link popularity check" and try one of the many link popularity tools available on the Web. If you find that there aren't many sites linked to yours, or that the sites that are linked have low search engine rankings, consider launching a link popularity campaign. Essentially, this entails contacting quality sites and requesting that they exchange links with your site. Of course, this requires checking out the rankings of the websites you want to link up with. Linking to popular, quality sites not only boosts your search engine ranking, but it also directs more quality traffïc to your website. [ You can also use www.linkpopularity.com to check the links back to your website. ] Search engine rankings are extremely important for a successful Internet marketing campaign. Before you go out and hire a search engine optimization company, try taking some of the simple steps listed above, and see if you can't boost your rankings yourself. Don't ever ignore this all-important factor in Internet marketing. Remember, the higher your search engine ranking, the more quality customers will be directed your way. Article reproduced with thanks to Dan Meiyers (www.emarketingbooks.com). To help you start planning your website, I've created a Check List that will help identify your requirements. Click here to display the Check List (PDF file 19 kb).
What do all those columns mean on your website statistics pages? Total hits: Total files: Total pages: Total visits: Total unique sites: Total unique URLs: Total unique referrers: Total unique user agents: Which total tells you the number of different visitors
to his site: 7 Basics of Good Web Design (PDF file) The Essential Code for Search Engine Optimization (PDF file) 43 Simple Ways to Build Trust in Your Website (PDF file) 15 tips for designing a successful web site (PDF file) How to write your website in 60 minutes (PDF file)
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