Website Design Northampton & Website Designers Northants

Web Designer in Desborough, Northampton

Website Designers Northants Menu

successful websites

Factors which determine your search engine position

by

Factors which determine your Search Engine Position in order of importance…

  • Keyword use in document title
    The document title is the text within the <title>…</title> tags in the HTML code of your web page.
    Example: <title>Your web page title</title>.  Use the search term within the document title.
  • Increase Global link popularity of web site
    The global link popularity measures how many web pages link to your site. The number of web pages linking to your site is not as important as the quality of the web pages that link to your site.
    All major search engines take the quality and the context of the links into account. Search engines assume that your web page must offer relevant content if many quality sites link to it.
  • Link texts of inbound links
    Inbound links are links from other web sites to your site. If many other sites link to your site, then search engines consider your site to be important. However, the number of links is not as important as is the relevance of the linking page and the link text used in linking to your site. To get a higher ranking on Google.co.uk (pages from the UK), make sure that the web pages that link to your site use your search terms. It is advisable to use different but related keywords for the link texts. If all links to your web site use exactly the same link text, then Google.co.uk (pages from the UK) might lower your rankings because of unnatural linking patterns. In addition, the quality and reputation of the web pages that link to your site is very important to the search engines.
  • Keyword use in body text
    The body text is the text on your web page that can be seen by people in their web browsers. It does not include HTML commands, comments, etc. The more visible text there is on a web page, the more a search engine can index. The calculations include spaces and punctuation marks. Increase the keyword density for your search terms in the body text.
  • Age of web site
    Spam sites often come and go quickly. For this reason, search engines tend to trust a web site that has been around for a long time over one that is brand new. The age of the domain is seen as a sign of trustworthiness because it cannot be faked.
  • Keyword use in H1 headline texts
    H1 headline texts are the texts that are written between the <h1>…</h1> tags in the HTML code of a web page. Some search engines give extra relevance to search terms that appear in the headline texts.
    Example: <h1>your very big headline text</h1>
  • Keyword use in domain name
    The domain name is the main part of the web page address.
    Example: “your-keyword” is the domain name of http://www.your-keyword.com
    If you have a young web site with only a few inbound links, then consider registering a new domain name that
    contains the search term “trombone cds”. If you have an established web site with a lot of inbound links, then you must compensate by improving the other search engine ranking factors.
  • Keyword use in page URL
    The page URL is the part after the domain name in the web page address.  Seperate your search terms in the page
    URL with slashes, dashes or underscores. Example: “keyword/another-keyword.htm” is the page URL of http://www.domain.com/keyword/another-keyword.htm
  • Links from social networks
    On social network sites, people decide which web sites are popular. This means that the popularity on social network sites cannot be easily influenced. For this reason, search engines might trust web sites more if they are popular on social networks. (“n/a” means “data not available”.)
  • Server speed
    Popular web sites often have faster server response times compared to smaller unimportant sites. In addition, most search engines index more pages from fast web sites.
  • Keyword use in H2-H6 headline texts
    H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6 headline texts are the texts that are written between the <h2>…</h2>, <h3>…</h3>, etc. tags in the HTML code of your web page. Some search engines give extra relevance to search terms that appear in the headline texts. Example: <h3>your big headline text</h3>
  • Keyword use in IMG ALT attributes
    The <img alt> attribute defines an alternative text for an image when the user uses a text browser or when the user has turned off the display of images in the web browser application. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer displays the alternative text if the user puts the cursor over the graphic. Example: <img src=”logo.gif” width=”200″ height=”75″ alt=”picture description with keyword”>
  • Top level domain of web site
    Web sites with certain top level domains (TLD) are statistically more likely to contain higher quality, trustworthy contents. For this reason, search engines might prefer web sites with restricted TLD (.edu, .gov., .mil) over younger TLD (e.g., .biz, .info, .jobs). In addition, country code TLD (e.g., .ca, .de, .fr) are often preferred in the country’s local search results.
  • Keyword use in bold body text
    The body text is the text on your web page that can be seen by people in their web browsers. The bold body text uses a darker and heavier face than the regular type face. It appears between <b>…</b> or <strong>…</strong> tags in the HTML source of your web page. CSS is not recognized. The statistics include spaces and punctuation marks.
  • Number of visitors to the site
    Search engines might look at web site usage data, such as the number of visitors to your site, to determine if your site is reputable and contains popular contents.
  • Keyword use in same domain link texts
    Link texts are words and sentences that are used as links. Same domain link texts are the link texts of the links that point to a web page on the same domain.
    Example: The HTML tag <a href=”contact.htm”>Contact information</a> contains the same domain link text “Contact information”.
  • Keyword use in outbound link texts
    Link texts are words and sentences that are used as links. Outbound link texts are the texts within the <a>…</a> tags when the <a> tag links to a web page on a different domain.
    Example: The HTML tag <a href=”http://www.not-your-site.com/about.htm”>About the company</a> contains the outbound link text “About the company”.
  • Keyword use in same domain link URLs
    Links connect one web page to another. Same domain links are the links in <a href> attributes that point to other pages on the same domain. Example: The HTML tag <a href=”contact.htm”>Contact information</a> contains the same domain link URL “contact.htm”.
  • Keyword use in outbound link URLs
    Links connect one web page to another. Outbound links are the links on a web page that point to web pages on other web sites, i.e. links to other domains. Example: The HTML tag <a href=”http://www.not-your-site.com/info.htm”>Click here</a> contains the outbound link URL “www.not-your-site.com/info.htm”.
  • Keyword use in meta description
    The Meta Description tag allows you to describe your web page. Some search engines display the text to the user in the search results. Example: <meta name=”description” content=”This sentence describes the contents of your web site.”> Even if the Meta Description tag might not be important for ranking purposes, you should use the Meta Description tag to make sure that your web site is displayed with an attractive description in the search results.
  • Number of trailing slashes in URL
    The number of trailing slashes (/) in the URL indicates where a web page falls in a site’s overall hierarchy. If the URL contains many trailing slashes, meaning it is placed in a sub-sub-directory, then the webmaster does not seem to think that the page is important in relation to the other pages.
  • HTML validation of web page to W3C standards
    Web pages are written in special languages called HTML and CSS. Like any language, HTML and CSS change
    constantly. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the governing body that establishes what is valid HTML/CSS and what is not. Search engines obey the HTML/CSS standard. If there are errors in the HTML/CSS code of your web page, then search engines might not be able to read everything of your web page.
  • Readability level of web page
    The Flesch Reading Ease test is a United States governmental standard to determine how easy a text is to read. It
    measures the approximate level of education necessary to understand the web page content. Higher scores indicate the text that is easier to read, and lower numbers mark harder-to-read texts. Scores among different languages are not comparable. To improve your score, break long sentences into shorter sentences and use shorter words. In addition, make sure that you end sentences with punctuation (a period, question mark, or exclamation point). There should be one space between each word, and after any punctuation, including commas.
  • Keyword use in meta keywords
    The Meta Keywords tag allows you to define which search terms are important to your web page according to your opinion. It should be placed between the <head>…</head> tags in the HTML code of your web page.
    Example: <meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword, another keyword”>
  • Keyword use in the first sentence of the body text
    The first sentence of the body text is the first sentence after the <body> tag in the HTML code of your web page. Some search engines give more relevance to search terms when they appear in the first sentence. Some will use your first sentence as the description of your page on the search result page.
    Example: <body>Here goes the first sentence. This text is not the first sentence.
  • Keyword use in HTML comments
    HTML comment tags are “hidden comments” in the HTML code of your web page. They are not visible to the user. Example: <!– comments with keywords –>
  • Search engine compatibility
    Search engines need text to index your web pages, to determine the theme of your web site and to produce a site summary. They cannot read what is written on your graphical images or in a Flash movie. Google recommends to create a useful, information-rich site. Fresh, continuously updated content is one of the best ways to ensure that search engines return to your web site (and your visitors, too). Some search engines penalize web sites if the search terms of the Meta Keywords tag don’t appear in the body text of the web page.

Got a project in mind?

01536 391 745 hello@tjdesign.uk

What’s preventing your top ranking?

by

Some ranking factors cannot be measured because the search engines do not reveal the necessary data, or it would be extremely time-consuming to measure.

Make sure you pay attention to the following factors because they could prevent your website achieving a top ranking.

Inbound links to your web page

  • Are the web pages linking to your web page relevant to your specific search terms.
  • How fast does your web page get new links pointing to it?
  • Do the web sites which link to your page belong to the same content category?
  • Since when do the links to your page exist?
  • Is the text surrounding the link to your page relevant to your search terms.

Your web page

  • How many important links from your other pages point to your web page?
  • Do the links on your web page point to high quality, topically-related pages?
  • How often and how many changes do you make to your web page over time? Is your content up-to-date?
  • How often and how many web pages do you add to your web site?
  • How long do your visitors spend time on your web page?

Search engine result page

  • Do your competitors on the search engine result page get a manual ranking boost by Google.co.uk, for example Amazon or Wikipedia?
  • How many visitors of the search engine result pages click through to your page?
  • How often do search engine visitors search for your company name or web page URL on Google.co.uk?

Negative ranking factors (you should be able to say “no” to all the following questions)

  • Is your content very similar or a duplicate of existing content?
  • Is your server often down when search engine crawlers try to access it?
  • Do you link to web sites that do not deserve a link?
  • Do you use the same title or meta tags for many web pages?
  • Do you overuse the same keyword or key phrase?
  • Do you participate in link schemes?
  • Do you actively sell links on your web page?
  • Do a majority of your inbound links come from low quality or spam sites?
  • Does your web page have any spelling or grammar mistakes?

Got a project in mind?

01536 391 745 hello@tjdesign.uk

So your website is now live, Congratulations! What next?

by

You have just paid a web designer for a sparkly new website so now you can take a break and expect the enquiries to come flooding in. Unfortunately unless you are a targeting an incredibly niche market, this is rarely the case.

A new website competes with other sites that have been around for years, potentially decades but there are a few things that you can do to make sure you end up higher in the listings, make sure Google lists you in their index as soon as possible and you end up with a search engine friendly website…

General

Here are some general tips to help track your website and enable your site to be listed quicker in the main search engines.

– Install Google Analytics or AWStats (which comes as standard with all hosting from TJ Design)
– Add your website to Google Webmaster Tools
– Link Google Analytics with Google Webmaster Tools
– Create a robots.txt file and upload it to the root directory of your site (go to www.yourwebsite.co.uk/robots.txt to check if you have one).
– Create a sitemap.xml file submit this to Google Webmaster Tool (go to www.yourwebsite.co.uk/sitemap.xml to check if you have one).

Link building

Many of the leading search engines count the amount and quality of your inbound links as a major factor so here are some tips.

– Create a ‘related links’ page on your website so you can link to reputable sites and even more importantly they link back to you. (think suppliers, local business directories, partners, industry associations not competitors)
– Add a Google My Business page
– Use Moz’s Open Site Explorer, and add your main competitors websites, view their “Inbound Links” from “Only External” sources to see their related links. Contact any reputable companies and request the opportunity to exchange links.
– Over time, the search engines will crawl your site and add you to their listing but you may be able to speed this process up by manually entering the URL for your site at these popular search engines..

Don’t use any automated submission programs to submit your site to multiple search engines at one time. This can be considered as spam and you could be removed completely.

– Spend as much time as possible adding your new website to business directories and use their features like reviews to make your profile really stand out. Here are some that I would recommend…

– Add your website link to your business cards, flyers, stationery, emails, forum signature and any social media platforms.

Summary

The above recommendations will give your new website a real kick-start to being found on the internet. It can be time-consuming trawling the internet looking for appropriate places to link back to your website but I can assure you that it’s well worth the effort. You should invest at least a couple of hours from when your website launches to make it a happy, healthy search engine friendly site ready to take on the competition. Good luck!

Got a project in mind?

01536 391 745 hello@tjdesign.uk

How do I get started with Google Analytics?

by

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics (GA) is a small piece of JavaScript code. This is added to your website in the background and can track every interaction the user makes.

It’s really important to use this or a similar statistics package so you can learn the behaviour of a typical user.

This is my preferred choice of analytics package. Although it can seem a little daunting and complex to a beginner. If you would like a lot of data and have the time to analyse and act upon it, you can make informed decisions with your website changes. It really maximise your websites performance.

To get started, request that your website designer follows the steps below..

  • Create or sign in to your Analytics account:
  • Set up a property in your Analytics account. A property represents your website or app, and is the collection point in Analytics for the data from your site or app.
  • Set up a reporting view in your property. Views let you create filtered perspectives of your data. For example, all data except from your company’s internal IP addresses, or all data associated with a specific sales region.
  • Follow the instructions to add the tracking code to your website template so you can collect data in your Analytics property.
  • Now grab yourself a cup of tea and be patient as it can take 24 – 48 hours for the metrics to start showing within your account.

How do I navigate the Google Analytics dashboard?

Now you have GA installed on your website the next step is to sign in to your account. An overview of your websites performance will be shown as the dashboard.

The ‘reports’ section is very useful and displays data for the following categories…

  • Real-Time (what is happening on your site right now such as the number of visitors, locations and pages they have visited)
  • Audience (displays demographics including age and gender)
  • Acquisition (the source of your website traffic i.e. organic search engine results or social media campaigns)
  • Behaviour (the behaviour of your visitors which includes how long they stick around and the bounce rate)
  • Conversions (when a goal is set up i.e. an enquiry form or download, the metrics will appear here)

The above information from the reports is really valuable.

You may find out that 75% of your visitors are normally male millennials which mostly use mobile phone devices.  Then you can really optimise your website content to suit your audience. You will also know which channel needs more focus to gain more traffic.

Which metrics should I focus on?

  • Acquisition overview
    This report provides insight in to the source of where your traffic is coming from, each source will have a different level of conversion. If your number is low for a particular source, i.e. direct visitors, is your website URL easy to spell and simple to remember?
  • Social overview
    Measures the impact of social media, do you need to create more website content with a social media campaign?
  • Bounce rate
    How quickly a visitor leaves your website without performing any actions. If you have a high bounce rate, do you have poor quality traffic or poor usability?
  • Traffic sources
    Focus on your top sources, this is also beneficial to determine if it’s worth continuing to pay for that annual subscription to that online directory.
  • Page views
    When used with other traffic sources, you can determine why a page has had a large number of views. Are you offering high quality content or is it because your visitor can’t find what they are looking for?
  • Exit pages
    This is very beneficial in determining at what stage your visitors are leaving your website so you can investigate further and take action.

Summary

Analytics can be a difficult subject to get your head around with it’s own technical jargon and complexity, however it is so valuable to get the most out of your website and to be able to grow online.

The above doesn’t even scratch the surface when it comes to GA but the above will get you started on installation and delve in to the first steps of measuring your websites performance.

Got a project in mind?

01536 391 745 hello@tjdesign.uk

Should I advertise on my website?

by

I get a lot of enquiries from my clients who receive a high volume of traffic, who would like to use their website for advertising space. I have always been slightly cautious of this approach as I feel if you don’t get it correct, the website you have worked so hard on will actually put visitors off and make them click elsewhere.

I decided to do some research so it wasn’t such a grey area and here are my findings…

Deciding whether or not to advertise space on your website depends on a couple of things:

  • Who your target audience are?
  • How would they react and would they benefit from advertising?

Once you have the above information, this will help you choose relevant adverts for your visitors. They are more likely to bring you revenue if the ads are something they are interested in.

How do I work out what to charge?

Pricing based on actions

Working out the cost to advertise on your site depends on how many unique visitors you receive per month. Obviously the more visitors, the more you can charge.

The amount varies but one way you can work this out is by working out the number of impressions the advertisement would get (i.e. the number of visits) and then give it a CPM (cost per thousand).

Smaller websites have a CPM of about £1 – £3 so for every thousand impressions the user would pay this amount. If your site had 10,000 unique visits, you could charge £10 – £30 per month for the advert.

There are other models available including cost per click (CPC) based on every click on the advert and cost per action (CPA) which is based on a click which then results in an action (i.e. a purchase).

Using advertising networks

Another way to advertise is to use a third party network such as Google AdSense which provides code to display on your website. You receive a small commission for each click.

Getting the most from your ads

A successful ad campaign is based around many factors but here is are some guidelines to generate the most revenue:

  • Testing
    Test different artwork (call to actions, size, shape, colour), banner placement and different offers including pricing so you have a better understanding of what works and what doesn’t.
  • Tracking
    Know your goals and set up tracking that you know who’s clicking on what and where your advertising traffic is coming from.

In summary, advertising on your website can be a little daunting but if you know your audience well, what they would like to see, charge the correct amount, test, test, test and track, you shouldn’t go too far wrong!

Got a project in mind?

01536 391 745 hello@tjdesign.uk

How to read AWStats to improve your website position

by

AWStats is a powerful reporting tool used to track visitors to your website. Any hosting package from myself includes this feature already built in.

This article attempts to explain the main terms used in AWStats so you can make sense of where people are coming from, why they are coming to your site and how you can use this to improve your position in the search engines.

  • Number of visits and number of unique visitors
    A unique visitor is a person / computer that has made a visit to your page, this is counted once. The number of visits are counted multiple times so if two people visit your page twice in a month, there would be two unique visitors and four visits.
  • Visits duration
    The visits duration section shows how much time visitors are spending on the website before leaving.
  • Usage by months, days of the week and hours of the day
    These sections shows the individual statistics for each day of the month / week and hours of the day.
  • Domains/countries
    This is pretty self-explanatory. It shows which countries your visitors are coming from.
  • Most viewed, entry and exit pages
    The most viewed are the most popular pages from your website. The entry page is the first page viewed by your visitor whilst the exit page is the last page viewed during their visit.
  • Visits of robots
    This displays the top 25 robots that have visited the website. (A robot is an automated process which visits your site frequently and saves a copy to be listed in the search engines).
  • Search engines, keyphrases and keywords used to find your site
    115 of the most famous search engines are detected like yahoo, google, altavista, etc. The search keyphrases and search keywords section display the words and phrases most commonly used by people to find the website. You can also use the section called connect to website from to find incoming traffic from external websites.


…so how do we use this to improve your website position?

You can use the unique visits and number of visits to gauge how active your visitors are and how well you acquire new visitors and returning visits.

A high percentage of visitors who leave before half a minute is common as many of these will be robots as mentioned previously, but if you have a large percentage in the next bracket, it could be a sign that you need to work on more engaging content.

The hourly / weekly / monthly breakdown can be used to show trends in your customer habits and the effect of any online marketing campaigns.

If one particular exit page is appearing more than others, it may mean that your visitor has not found what they are looking for.

You can view the list of search engines and make sure that you are included in as many as possible.

The keywords and keyphrases should be similar to the ones you are targeting. If not, you may need to do some keyword research.

Check the connect to website from to find out if external links to your website are relevant and reputable. You can also exchange links with suitable websites and run social media campaigns to increase this traffic.

To summarize, the idea is that you see an incremental curve in the bar graph for your monthly history for unique visits and number of visits. Most companies have a quieter period but generally you should be expecting these stats to increase vs prior month and definitely prior year.

If you would like to know more about AWStats, contact me here.

Got a project in mind?

01536 391 745 hello@tjdesign.uk