Web promotion and optimisation tips
- Ensure your web hosting service is reliable. There are many cheap hosting services out there, but they may also have a lot of ‘down time’. There is no point having a brilliant web site if it is often unavailable due to technical problems with your hosting service. Your web designer should be able recommend and arrange reliable and cost-effective hosting for you.
- Provide good concise, descriptive, introductory text and try to explain what your web site is about in the first few sentences, including the key words that you think visitors will be looking for in search engines. You can expand further down the page or on a separate page give more detailed information about your company or what your organisation is about. Include your full company details such as company registration details, charity registration number, or vat number to show you are legitimate/reputable.
- Ensure important information on your site is represented as text. Non-text elements can include images, graphics, audio clips, or other feature that conveys meaning through a picture or sound. Examples include buttons, check boxes, pictures and embedded or streaming audio or video. Not all visitors to your web site will be able to see these and search engines will not be able to ‘read’ your site as effectively. Your web designer should ensure that all non-text elements include meta descriptions.
- Include your full company details, with your web address on all paperwork. Include links and logos (with links) in electronic documents such as PDF files, Word and PowerPoint documents. Don’t forget to make use of press releases, E-groups, forums and the like to promote your site.
- Include added interest such as useful information, guides, downloadable product catalogues or newsletter. Diversify your site, within the bounds of your business, and create good quality content and targeted pages.
- Link building is a powerful way to get your website higher in the search engines, it can be very time consuming but is very worth while. Try to get other web sites to use proper words when linking to your site e.g. web designer Cornwall, rather than www.jayne-herbert.co.uk. Most sites will request a reciprocal link so it is often worth including a ‘related links page’, on your site especially for this.
- Make sure you have some kind of web statistical reporting available, like Google Analytics or AWstats, so you can actually monitor what is happening on your web site and make changes if necessary.
- Never let your domain name expire unless you REALLY want it to. Someone else can buy it if you do not renew it. You may not be able to get it back, or may have to pay a large sum to regain ownership. Businesses often buy domains that are high ranking just to get traffic. Your web designer will often offer an automatic renewal service.