Make The Most
Make The Most
Making the
most of your
website
content
This is a short description of the document, and what is
contained within. This can be a few sentences long but
shouldn’t be much more than that.
Customer Support | Making the most of your website content
Contents
Introduction ............................................................................................1
Develop your customer experience.....................................................1
Know your target audience ...................................................................1
Product placements and descriptions ..................................................1
Don’t stop your customers from purchasing from you! ........................3
Getting your site seen ...........................................................................3
How does a search engine work? ........................................................4
Human powered directories ..............................................................4
Crawler based search engines..........................................................5
Hybrid search engines .......................................................................5
Submitting your site to search engines ................................................6
Speeding up the process...................................................................7
Optimizing your site for crawler based search engines .......................7
Designing your site with search engines in mind .............................8
Meta tags .........................................................................................13
Links .................................................................................................18
Advertising Techniques ......................................................................23
Search engine PPC advertising .........................................................23
Other PPC advertising techniques .....................................................25
Keeping track of your website rankings ...........................................25
Further reading and useful tools .......................................................26
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Customer Support | Making the most of your website content
Introduction
While it is relatively easy to create a website, if you want to get the maximum
possible potential from your website a little time and planning can really help you
build your online presence and develop your brand.
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way. For example, let’s take a look of the attributes associated with a digital
camera.
Reading this I’m still not sure if this is a good camera or not, but let’s explain the
benefits to the customer in a simple way and see if we can make the product
more appealing.
Smile Shutter waits until the subject smiles before firing the shutter with
adjustable smile threshold setting.
Enhanced Face Detection with high-speed subject tracking for clearer
portraits.
BIONZ processor for enhanced image quality and fast response.
Double Anti-blur with Super SteadyShot image stabilization and High
Sensitivity ISO 3200 for clearer handheld shooting in low light.
D-Range Optimiser adjusts exposure and contrast in high contrast and
backlit scenes.
Now I can relate to this a lot better, and now know what this product will do for
me. Just as high street stores spend a lot of time and money designing their
window displays and showing their products in the best possible light, placing
and branding products on your website is equally important.
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While we can show in very general terms how search engines work, and what
you can do to improve your search engine ranking, the precise algorithms search
engines use are closely guarded secrets and tend to get updated on a regular
basis. For this reason, while we can also offer tips and guidelines to improve your
websites popularity, if search engine rankings are important to you or your
business you may be better off recruiting the services of an individual or
company specializing in this area and who keeps up to date with these trends on
a full time basis.
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Once a site has been “spidered” it will send all the relevant information regarding
a website to a huge database (called the “index”) for processing. Finally, another
program will trawl through the millions of pages that have been stored in the
index looking for matches to searches, and ranking them in order of relevance.
It is this last section that is a closely guarded secret, and will differ slightly from
one search engine to the next. In addition, the way this program ranks the
millions of pages is often changed. This, and the fact that every other website is
attempting the same thing, is what makes website optimisation a specialized and
challenging profession.
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You can speed this up, by manually submitting your site to crawler based search
engines, but there are no guarantees this will get your website indexed. You can
manually submit your sites to major search engines at the following links:
Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/
Yahoo: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit
Live Search: http://search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx
Live Search: http://search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx
AOL: http://www.dmoz.org/add.html
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More information on this is available in the chapter Error! Reference source not
found. on page 23. However, if you are interested in getting your website seen
as quickly as possible, this may a good method to use.
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Spiders read the code of the website, not the image through a web browser.
While your site may be designed to perfection, how pretty is the coding behind it?
HTML can quickly look complicated and cluttered with design rules and styles.
Using CSS to style your web pages is much more efficient, makes your pages
lighter, and clears away the clutter, allowing the spider to concentrate on the
content of your site rather than the design style.
Spiders cannot see an image or a flash file and will not interpret them. If you
have something important to say, make sure that it is in the content of the
website. Websites made completely from Flash may look impressive, but if
spiders have no idea what’s going on they are not going to be able to evaluate
your site. If you are displaying images on your site, you should use an <alt> tag
that will show a description of the image. Spiders (and software to help the
visually impaired) will be able to read these tags and get a description of your
image.
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In order to optimise your ranking with search engines, try and avoid frames
wherever possible.
Remember that search engines do not rank websites, but individual web pages.
Remember to spend time on each page, tailoring your tags to match the content
on each page.
Similar to using CSS, as described above, remove any extraneous code from
your website and optimise it for web use. If possible, move any scripts to the foot
of your webpage, keeping your web content at the top.
Photos have a much higher resolution than customer’s monitors, so you can
reduce the quality of these without affecting their appearance online. This will
reduce the file size and customers will be able to download your site much
quicker.
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Customer Support | Making the most of your website content
This is only a very brief overview of designing websites with search engines in
mind, and more information can be found on the internet. A few good places to
start are shown below.
Keywords
Choosing keywords for your site always appears easier than it actually is. The
first thing to consider is what search terms people may use to search for your
site. It is always best to ask a few friends what keywords they may use as quite
often you will find them different than the keywords you were expecting. The
other thing to take into consideration is competition from other websites. Some
keywords are hotly contested by many of the largest companies in the world. If
you ran a second hand book store in Edinburgh for example, initially you may
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Customer Support | Making the most of your website content
‘Books’ is a very generic term encompassing a number of products that you may
not supply anyway, so by specializing with your keywords you will be able to
compete in a less heavily contested market for services that more match your
services. The keyword phrase “rare books” or “classic books” will be easier to
work with when trying to achieve high rankings in these slightly more specialized
searches.
As with most search engine optimisation, there are no specific rules that will
govern what are the best keywords to use for your site, choosing the best
keywords for a site comes with experience, knowledge of competing sites and
sometimes, trial and error. There are tools available that will help you to choose
your perfect keywords, such as:
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/keyword-difficulty/
This site allows you to see how difficult it will be to rank a keyword or phrase.
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Customer Support | Making the most of your website content
http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-playground.php
This page allows you to see the popularity of a keyword of phrase, to judge how
effective a keyword may be.
http://www.webconfs.com/website-keyword-suggestions.php
This site inspects your website and will offer some suggested keywords for
checking and consideration.
http://www.google.com/webhp?complete=1&hl=en
Google suggest will not only show how many sites will appear for a particular
keyword, but will also offer search suggestions as you enter your keywords.
Once you have your chosen keywords, the next step is to start using them.
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Customer Support | Making the most of your website content
Meta tags
Though some search engines use meta tags others now ignore them. You don’t
lose anything by adding them, but also remember tags alone will not make your
site rank higher than your competitors, as with anything else, meta tags are one
tool among many in the search engine optimisers toolbox.
Meta tags are usually added to the header information and are written in HTML.
There are three main tags that you can use. Let’s have a look at each type in turn
and see how it affects your site.
Title
While not strictly a meta tag, this is a very important tag to include in your
website. It also makes your website appear more professional as any text you
add here will appear in the title bar of the web browser.
Search engines will look at the title and use this to build their impression of your
site. This will also influence your site description when appearing in search
listings.
The title tag will also appear in the favourites list, if a customer bookmarks your
site. The title really has an impact on the impression customers and search
engines have on your website, so it is worth spending a couple of minutes in
getting it right. Ideally it should incorporate a few key phrases into a brief
introduction of your site.
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1 <head>
3 </head>
Meta Description
The meta description tag will allow you to influence the description shown in
some organic search engine rankings.
Some search engines will ignore this tag and generate their own description.
However enough search engines still use this tag to make creating a description
worthwhile. Like the title tag, this should be a brief description of the web page,
and should ideally be under 250 characters.
In the above example we may have a meta description of “Tips and tricks for all
aspects of bee keeping and honey making. This page offers help and advice for
anyone interested in bee keeping for both the hobbyist, and the honey making
professional.”
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So let’s add this into our HTML header information, along with the title tag we
created earlier…
1 <head>
aspects of bee keeping and honey making. This page offers help and advice
for anyone interested in bee keeping both for the hobbyist, and the honey
making professional”/>
4 </head>
Meta Keywords
While this used to be an important part of search engine optimisation, these days
many search engines will ignore any Meta keywords within your website.
However, if you have been reading this tutorial from the start we will have already
created our keywords for the website. As we already know the keywords we want
to add, and some search engines still use this information, it would be foolish for
us to ignore this field completely. So let’s add our keywords to the HTML header
information.
1 <head>
aspects of bee keeping and honey making. This page offers help and advice
for anyone interested in bee keeping both for the hobbyist, and the honey
making professional”/>
5 </head>
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Customer Support | Making the most of your website content
Website content
Now that we have our metadata and we know which keywords or phrases we are
going to target we can concentrate on optimizing our website for search engines.
We have mentioned briefly how search engines work, and how “spiders” crawl
through your site looking for content. As well as the meta data described above,
these spiders will also look at the first paragraph or so of text on each page, and
this will form a part of how your page ranks for your chosen keywords.
Most search engines these days will ignore the meta keywords, but will generate
their own, based upon the opening lines of your website. This is a tricky area to
get right, as you have to use your keywords, yet still make the opening paragraph
clear and readable for your customers.
Search engines will read the opening paragraph, and remove common words,
such as and, at, there etc. (A list of words that search engines exclude is
available at http://www.webconfs.com/stop-words.php ). They will then analyse
the remaining words and work out the relative importance of what is left. The
importance of certain words is worked out by looking at two factors: location and
frequency.
Location: Search engines work on the theory that anything relevant to your
website will be mentioned at the top of the webpage, and any information
that’s further down the page will be less relevant to the actual site content.
The closer to the top of a page the text is the more important it will appear
to a spider.
Frequency: In a similar manner, if a word if important to a website, it will
probably be mentioned frequently. The more frequently a word is
mentioned the more important it must be.
With this information the search engine will then create keywords that will best fit
its perception of your site.
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So, to optimise your website for crawler based search engines, you need to get
to the point quickly, using keywords or phrases that customers are likely to use to
find your site. A good example of this can be found at http://www.apple.com. If
you look at the words used in this site, and the number of occurrences, you will
find the following:
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All the words people may use to find their site are mentioned frequently on the
home page. By carefully wording the content on your website you can go a long
way towards getting good search engine rankings. Once you have written the
content for your website you can check the keywords of your site with a “keyword
density checker”, like the one available at: http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-
density-checker.php.
Links
As well as generating keywords for your site, search engines will also look at how
your site fits in with the rest of the internet. They particularly dislike dead ends on
the internet, so at the very least, you should ensure that each page on your
website will link to another.
Check the links within your website. Spiders will follow all the links within your
website, so provided that all the pages of your site link together you can be
confident that spiders will be able to index each page of your site. A site map is a
good way of making sure that you have multiple ways of linking your different
pages together. As well as being useful to your customers who may be visiting
your site for the first time, or looking for something specific, once a spider has
found your site map, it is easy for it to follow the links in the site map for index
each page on your site.
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Earlier we mentioned how if a website links to your site crawler based search
engines will naturally find your website and index you with no further action
needed on your part.
When we were explaining how search engines work we discussed links to your
website and tips on improving the number of links to your site. However, search
engines don’t just look at the quantity of links to your site, they will also check the
quality of these links. To judge the quality of a site search engines will measure
two things. Relevance and authority.
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Customer Support | Making the most of your website content
There are many ways of encouraging people to link to your site. Here are 5 tips
to help you build links to your website:
1 Have a site that people want to visit! Write interesting articles and
provide unique information or tools in your site. While a well thought out
and interesting article may not directly generate sales to your company,
people will link to it, adding more visitors to your website and improving
your rankings.
2 Sign up for directory services and listings relevant to your website.
There are many websites that offer a directory listing relevant to your site.
Sign up for them and get yourself known.
3 Join the community! A natural and effective method of adding relevant
links to your site is to participate in the community that you are targeting
with your website. Join some forums and discussion groups; not only will
you be able to keep in touch with the issues and needs of your chosen
market group, you will also get your name in the minds of your target
audience.
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Customer Support | Making the most of your website content
4 The least taxing way is to find other sites similar to yours and ask them to
add a link to your website. This can often create a few quality links with little
effort (although you should reciprocate the favour by adding a link to their
website from your own). You should be careful that these are relevant sites.
5 Add tools to your site to allow visitors to submit your site to some of the
larger online communities. Communities such as Digg, Stumble, del.icio.us,
Facebook and Twitter have large followings, getting an article recognized in
one of these groups can direct a large amount of traffic to your site (which
often creates a knock on effect with other communities following the trend).
While members of these communities will know how to bookmark a page,
just making it easier for them and reminding them can be a great help.
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Customer Support | Making the most of your website content
Each search engine has tools available to help you check links to your site. In
Google for instance, you can enter site:<domain-name> into the search bar to
see all the sites that link to yours. Alternatively some sites such as
http://www.linkpopularity.com/ will have a free tool you can use to check how
many links you have ranked with different search engines.
Finally, there are tools available that will help you to build up a number of
relevant links to your site. Once such tool is http://www.webconfs.com/backlink-
builder.php.
And finally.
The precise techniques that search engines use to rank websites are closely
guarded and change often, as you can see from the above, there are no set rules
you can use to gain instant rankings, but there are a number of steps you can
take to help you along the way. Remember, the final condition that search
engines use is “clickability”, even if you have the number one ranking website, if
no one clicks the links to your site it will lose rankings, and even if you have a
terrible site as far as search engines are concerned, if you have enough visitors,
then you will go up the rankings.
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Customer Support | Making the most of your website content
Advertising Techniques
There are two main ways of advertising on the internet, you can advertise in
search engines, or within other people’s websites. How you pay for these adverts
is usually similar which ever technique you use.
Generally, with online advertising you will pay a one off “activation fee”, and then
pay a small fee each time someone clicks on one of your adverts. For this
reason, this is generally called “pay per click” (PPC) advertising. This form of
advertising allows you to target your intended audience much more specifically
than more traditional forms of advertising. In addition, as you only pay when a
customer follows a link to your website you tend to get better value for money
than blanket marketing campaigns.
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The difference with this method is that you are able to target the audience that is
most likely to use your product, rather than spending part of your budget
advertising to people who will not be interested. Microsoft AdCenter for example
has a wide range of conditions so if you have a website for your Pizza delivery
company in Bristol, you could choose to advertise only to 15-40 year olds living in
Bristol during the hours of 16:00 – 23:00. Again, this method will cost you
money, but if it’s important that your site is listed high up in the results, and
quickly, then this is another option open to you.
More details on this type of advertising may be found at the following links:
Microsoft AdCenter:
http://advertising.microsoft.com/uk/Advertise/default.aspx?pageid=903
Google AdWords: http://adwords.google.com/select/Login
Yahoo! Search marketing:
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/en_GB/arp/sponsoredsearch_v3.php
?o=GB0338
ASL (Ask sponsored listings):
http://sponsoredlistings.ask.com/sponsored_listing.php
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There are many companies that support this type of advertising campaign. We
are unable to recommend a specific company, but if you search for a few online
you should be able to find one that will suit your needs.
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You will not gain instant rankings in organic search engine listings. Good organic
rankings take time and effort; you can monitor your progress at:
http://www.urltrends.com/.
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