A website is a marketing tool, it is your online brochure and is a very cost effective way of promoting your business. From a small initial outlay and a low annual webhosting cost starting from about $100 per year including a Domain Name, you can be promoting your business and products on the Internet. It is your Yellow Pages advertisement but at a much lower cost and with a lot more information.
The average Australianы is relying more and more on the internet. If you are a business or individual then you should ask the question, can I afford not to be on-line.
Do you need a website
- Do you want to promote your products?
- Do you want to promote a service that you offer?
- Do you want to share your thoughts, ideas and knowledge?
- Do you want a way to interact with your clients?
If you want to do some or even all of the above then a website is probably for you.
What you need to know
When starting a new website and we are building it for you, there are some important things you need to know to help your new website maximise it’s search ranking and therefore, exposure to potential clients.
There are a number of points to note:·
- There are billions of websites in countless categories.
- Only about 10 websites will show up on page one of a search and only one search can rank in first place based on your search criteria.
- Great looking websites often rank poorly. Search engines can not tell how appealing a website is, they primarily look at content and site structure.
- You should aim to have your website rank on page one on at least one search criteria. Ranking on page one will effectively give your site respect and greater exposure to potential clients.
- Passive websites will require you to market them with advertising to increase your exposure. This will cost you.
- Active and dynamic websites, if done well, will sell themselves and save you money.
- An active and dynamic website is all about content. When search engines crawl your website, they will in no particular order be looking at:
- Your site structure and how well it is optimised for search engines.
- Number of pages and quality and relevancy of page content.
- Frequency of updating, particularly blogging.
- Speed of page loading.
- How many other sites are linking to you and the quality of those links.
- How long has the domain name and website been active by the current user/website.
- For an typical average website, traffic mainly comes from:
- Google Search 70%
- Returning visitors 10%
- Referral Traffic 10%
- Other search engines 10%
- Social media will boost your exposure. FaceBook now has over 500 million users and growing rapidly and is well indexed by various search engines. Facebook is now the most trafficked social media website in the US with greater than a 50% share and is growing at about 8-10 percent a month. Facebook is now driving up to 50% of business traffic.
- Quality regular blogging will increase your ranking and on-line exposure.
How do you want your website to look?
There is no right or wrong way that a website should look like, however most websites have evolved to a similar look and function.
People expect to find certain things in certain places on a website so for a business website, it pays to stay with conventional ways of design. You want your potential clients to be able to easily find the information that they are looking for. Think about some of the websites you have visited and how difficult it was to find what you want. Keeping it simple will pay dividends in attracting clients and help to keep the cost of developing your website lower.
Website layout
A website will usually have a company logo, page navigation, content, and a footer as a minimum. It may also have a header where a showcase image/s can be displayed. We will work through these items with you during the design of your website. Your website, while under development, will be available online for you to follow the progress. It will not be available to search engines such as Google during the design stage.
Page ranking
Everybody wants to be on the top of page one of a web search. Many companies will promise to put you on page one but in reality, the only way to get there is to pay for advertising and even then it will depend on many other factors such as how many other companies are paying for advertising.
To rank high, an optimised website is only about 20% of the equation. The main things that you need to rank well are lots of good quality content, lots of quality inbound links, regularly quality blogging and integration with social media.
New websites may take some days or weeks to show up on a web search, a lot depends on your website design and it is here we can help you.
Spiders and Robots
Once you have your website on-line and it is discovered it will be visited, or scanned if you like, by search engine programmes called spiders, web crawlers, robots and a various number of other names. These are programmes that scan websites to find out what your site is about and report back to the various search engines so they can decide where to place your website in their listings.
This process of web crawling or spidering is used as a means of providing up to date information about a website to Google and other search engines. They are used to create a copy of all visited pages for processing and indexing web pages to improve search speed. The main thing to know is that web crawlers can only see text. They cannot read images and flash or other type of videos. The web crawler can only see any written information about these types of files such as their names and descriptions. Image heavy sites may therefore not rank very well as well as having a slow page load speed. It is most important to realise here that webpages full of images, no matter how good they look, will most likely rank poorly. This is not what you want from our websites, you want your website to rank well.
What is involved in setting up a website
We will take care of the entire process of setting up a new website for you. We will:
- Purchase and register a domain name. Think of a domain name as being similar to a street address. A domain name is your address on the internet.
- Purchase a hosting package. Your website will need to visible to the internet. Web hosting companies store or host your website and make it available on-line.
- Build your new website. This is where we plan, design and build your new website. When we are finished and you are happy with the look and design, we optimise the website and make it visible to various search engines.
For further information on setting up a website, you can find out about our creation process here.