There are hundreds of millions of websites on the internet so obviously most websites are not going to just show up on Google’s front page in fact it can take a lot of work to get there! This is by no means to be taken as a definitive guide but simply to cover what I believe are the primary drivers of getting your website in a decent position in Google. So here we go….

On Page Search Engine Optimisation

Keywords

This is the process of optimising your websites code, copy (the text) & even the images for search engines.

Search Engines such as Google rely on looking through your websites text and meta data (tags in the back end of the websites code attached to pages, images etc) to determine what your website is about. Google considers words or topics that are consistently recurring in your website as indicators (we’ll call these keywords) to where it should display your website in search results. For example if you wanted your website to appear on Google when someone searched for Website Designers then it would be good practice to include the words “website designers” in your meta data & have it recurring in your website text.

To add another level of complexity where these “keywords” appear on your website also have weightings for example a page title or content heading with your keywords would be given more value than just including them in your paragraphs.

Content

As mentioned above Google relies on words to see what your website is about. A rule of thumb is to have at least 600 words on your website (this is not definitive but a personal point of view) with good keyword density. Going overboard on the keywords is frowned upon a fair indicator would be 1-2 keywords per 200 words.

Also updating and adding more content regularly is also viewed favourably, firstly because a Search Engine will view your site as an active source of information as opposed to a website that someone has setup and left to gather dust. And secondly because it gives you more opportunity to add keywords to your site!

Finally and most importantly MAKE YOUR CONTENT QUALITY crap content equals crap website & poor first impressions for your business. Provide valuable content to your users and traffic & good search engine results will come naturally!

One way to get users coming back again and again is to build a community of your website – this can be as simple as allowing users to comment on your website through to a forum or even a fully fledged community platform (like a mini facebook)

Off Page Search Engine Optimisation

This is the process of building YOUR websites reputation with search engines.

So just to be clear Google already knows your website exists, you show up in search results but just not in the position you would like….i.e. you’re showing up on page 5 of Google’s search results rather than page 1. It is surprising the amount of people who think that just because you have a website online that they’ll automatically be in Google’s top search results just because that’s what your website is about. Businesses spend a lot of time, effort & money getting to the top of search results of profitable search phrases, it very rarely just happens.

So how do you build your sites reputation? Arguably the most important aspect of this process is adding links to your website on other 3rd party websites. This can be partner websites that you have an existing relationship with, posting comments on blogs or forums, press releases, directory listings or article submission services.

The more relevant, high quality links you have pointing to your website the more popular, valuable and interesting Google assumes your website is and as a result will show your website in a more prevalent position in search results.

At the end of the day

Getting your website to rank highly in Search Engines is both a science and an art, what works today may not work in a months time as Google is constantly updating its search algorithyms to ensure they are showing the most appropriate results to users search queries.

One thing that will not change though is search engines goal of trying to provide the best match to what their users are searching for. By ensuring your website is helpful, well laid out and genuinely focuses on users needs rather than JUST Search Engine Optimisation you’ll place yourself in a favourable position in the world of online business.

Click here to arrange a free consultation with one of our web design  or Search Engine Optimisation  team.

If a brand presents well online, it’s usually because it’s based on a simple combination of basic colours.

“The most common colours are your primary colours: reds, oranges, yellows, greens and blues,” says Simon Rowell, founder of Brand Intellect. “They’re the most popular because those colours tend not to really go completely out of fashion.”

The first step in taking a brand online is to look at the colours it uses as a basis. The colours used on your website should work to support these without diluting their impact.

“There should be some sort of clear story told through the website that actually links what they’re saying online to their offline brand,” says Rowell. “It’s really about having one colour, having a consistent story, and not having any confusion. The colours used in the website really should back up the positioning that the organisation is trying to take.”

The key is to not get too carried away with supporting colours, as the focus should be kept squarely on the brand itself.

“With too many colours, you end up creating a bit of a circus effect, which ends up being no good for anybody,” says Rowell. “You just end up looking a bit like you’ve created the website at home.”

He uses the Australian website for financial services company Goldman Sachs as an example of secondary web colours trying to do too much.

“To differentiate the various sections, they’ve used alternate colours. That in itself isn’t a bad idea, but when you look at the site, it becomes a bit of a mess because they’re using primary colours against one another,” Rowell explains. “Even if they were using those colours and they were muted right down, it would look like quite a different experience; but this website looks reasonably dated, even though it’s probably not.”

Rowell singles Westpac out as a sound example of a business that has managed to strengthen its existing brand through careful selection and use of sympathetic colours online.

“Westpac uses a great deal of red through their site, but they also use a grey or platinum colour– which tends to give it a little bit more of a premium edge – as well as a light purple,” he explains. “It’s a very diluted purple that’s designed to give it a little bit more life, because the grey brings it down a bit. They’re using colours that are slightly muted, but are still getting across a mood without really competing too much with the primary brand.”

Michelle Allen, director of Webstuff.biz, encourages businesses to be highly critical when choosing online colours, and to not simply settle for a colour because they might be fond of it.

To give her clients a better idea of what might work to complement their logo online, Allen directs them to do some of their own colour research using an online colour wheel, such as the one found at ColorSchemeDesigner.com.

Find your brand’s core colour on the wheel to the left of the page, and you’ll be presented with an array of complementary and sympathetic colours, along with their hex codes (a unique code used by designers to identify colours).

The best way to understand how to use a colour wheel is to take use it to look at how existing brands might have used such a tool to arrive at their online colour palettes. The following is a concise look at some of the more common colours used in branding, and what secondary colours might support them best in an online context.

Blue

Blue is very commonly used online, as it’s associated with trust and credibility, especially in western cultures.

“There’s a natural inclination to look at the colour blue and feel a bit safe,” says Brand Intellect’s Rowell. “This is why you quite often find banks, legal companies, or insurance companies tending towards blue if they can.”

Applied colour psychology specialist Karen Haller also points out that blue is common among social network brands.

“The social media giants – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – have all chosen blue to represent their brand, all using different tones that in themselves have their own subtle meanings,” she says. “Blue is the colour of the intellect, the mind, making it the colour of communication, and when you think about social media, it’s all about communicating.”

According to Anthony Bologna, design director at Trout Creative Thinking, blue is particularly useful for companies that need to elicit the customer’s trust.

“It’s really about decisions which are fairly high involvement – where there’s a high penalty to pay through making the wrong decision – as opposed to low involvement like buying toothpaste,” he says. “Choosing a lawyer or choosing a bank or an insurance company is pretty important, so those sort of companies tend towards the blues.”

Entering the ‘Facebook blue’ hex code (3B5998) into the ‘triad’ setting of the colour wheel, and adjusting the white colour points will show you how the social media service arrived at the subtle shade of green currently used in the Facebook Mobile illustration and ‘sign up’ button on its landing page.

Red

Red is a colour most commonly used to drive customer impulses.

“Red is very much a retail colour,” says Brand Intellect’s Rowell. “It’s about passion and excitement, and impulse and now.”

He singles out fast food companies like McDonalds and Red Rooster, as well as phone companies like Vodafone, as good examples of brands that use the colour to stand out and encourage impulse buying.

It’s interesting to note that Westpac, a company in an industry that traditionally aligns itself with the trusted overtones of blue, has built its entire brand around the colour red.

“The red colour is generally associated with excitement, desire and passion in a western context,” says Rowell. “Really, what Westpac is trying to do is add a little bit of professionalism and trust by using the light purple and the grey/platinum, to give themselves a sense of stability, and make them look quite a serious company, as they are.”

Entering the approximate hex code of FF0000 into the ‘triad’ setting of the colour wheel shows how Westpac came to find its muted purple. Repeating the process with that colour’s hex code (420042) will reveal the dark grey used by in the bank’s header and text.

For businesses planning on targeting international markets, it’s wise to note that some colours have different cultural connotations in other countries.

“In China, it means good luck. In Russia, it’s a bit old fashioned, because it’s associated with communism,” says Rowell.

Orange/Yellow

Given that a white background is the best drawing board for any business creating an online presence, the use of highlight colours like orange and yellow on a new website is a bit risky. Trout Creative’s Bologna still insists that it has merit as a highlight colour, noting that it’s particularly effective when used on a black background.

“It creates a little bit of excitement and an air of innovation. It’s bold,” he says. “It’s probably the strongest highlight colour that’s used all around the world. In Europe, for example, basically every street sign is yellow.”

One of the most famous examples of a consumer-facing yellow brand is that of the Yellow Pages. Note that the directory’s eye-catching brand is heavily anchored by its use of black. Similar to this is the Australian no frills label Black and Gold.

Placing the hex code of the yellow used on the Yellow Pages Australian homepage (FFDD22) into the color wheel gives a clear indication of what led the company’s designer to settle on the green and light blue of its online palette.

As with red, both yellow and orange have pointed cultural connotations in other parts of the world.

“In Ireland, orange is a religiously-charged colour, because it’s aligned with Protestantism. Being a predominantly catholic country, there’s issues there,” says Rowell.

“Yellow in the old fashioned sense in western culture, is associated with cowardice in some respects, but in Japan it’s associated with courage,” he continues. “In Egypt, it’s associated with mourning.”

Green

The colour green is most commonly used in western branding among ecologically-inclined companies. Whether or not a business is ‘green friendly’ the use of green as a basic brand colour will summon that type of connotation for most people that encounter it.

It’s no surprise that oil company BP should have built its brand around green. A quick look at the colour wheel spectrum for its basic colour (009900) demonstrates the rationale behind the varying shades of green and dusty yellow used to underline headings and copy at BP.com

“Green’s a colour that’s become much more popular in recent years, because of the growth of environmentalism in Australia,” says Rowell. “It’s very much associated with Islam, in predominantly Hindu countries. In China green is associated with infidelity. Those sort of things need to be thought about from the point of view of a website.”

Take the guess work out of your online branding. Contact the Web Designers team today to discuss your brand

Regardless, there are a number of basic measures that can be taken to help target smartphone users. While the nuances of regular SEO are intricate and ever-changing, optimising a site for mobile search only takes some simple steps and a little common sense.

Usability

With mobile search, you have to consider where your customer will be searching from and anticipate some display limitations in the device they’re using.

“We have to assume that they’re very time-poor, because they’re not sitting at a workstation; they’re on the bus or in a nightclub,” says Sean Heylen, managing director of software development company Deadline.

This is why it’s ideal to brief a designer to create a separate, streamlined version of your site that strips unnecessary information and navigation away and gives mobile visitors exactly what they’re looking for.

“Don’t look at putting all of your website content onto your mobile site. All that content’s great on a desktop, but it’s not great on a mobile device,” says Chris Harris, CEO of search marketing company Bamboo.

Navigation and formatting should also be reconsidered for display on a smartphone or tablet. If the cost of having a separate mobile site designed is beyond your marketing budget, it’s worth noting that any site designed in accordance with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards ought to display well on most mobile devices.

“If a site has been developed in the last 12 months, those web developers may have developed using the right CSS or right coding practices, and it would be mobile friendly,” says Harris.

A simple example of the minimum functionality is Simon Collison’s site, Colly.com. Let the site load in a separate tab and then drag the corner of your browser to reduce the size of the frame. You’ll notice that the formatting collapses to fit the new frame size.

“The first collapse is your iPad view, and then the next view is getting into your mobile devices,” says Harris. “It’s very well structured in terms of simple images, simple boxes of text.”

If a search engine can tell that your site has been modified and refined for mobile users, it’s more likely to favour it over those that haven’t.

“Google’s always going to want to deliver relevant results to a user,” says Jim Stewart, CEO of Optimising SEO and Design.

“If your site is mobile friendly and mobile compatible, and your competition’s isn’t, Google is going to display yours to a mobile user before it displays theirs,” says Optimising’s Stewart.“Google wants to give a good experience to its users. In everything it does, it tries to deliver the most relevant content, and that includes what sort of experience you’re delivering to the user.”

The way traffic behaves on a mobile site will also give search engines some indication of its relevance. If someone clicks on a search listing for a site but leaves (or ‘bounces’) immediately, Google treats that as a sign that the destination wasn’t particularly relevant to their search query. Harris notes that, although Google has yet to officially acknowledge that mobile bounce rates affect search rankings, it’s likely this will eventually impact on mobile search – a further reason to spend time on improving the mobile usability of a site.

Mobile sitemap

One of the most important considerations in web design is to remove any barriers that stand between the user and the information they’re looking for. Given the limiting nature of a device like an iPad or an Android phone, this is especially true for mobile devices and mobile search.

“A website with lots and lots of pages, or with hundreds of images on every page, is not going to be user-friendly for someone searching and accessing your site on a mobile,” says Victor Navarro, content manager at search marketing agency Outrider.

A family-owned furniture company may have good reason to include an ‘About us’ section detailing the history of the business online, but pages and pages of irrelevant text and images are of no use to someone on a day trip in search of a sofa.

For the purposes of mobile search, you need to identify the two or three key areas of your site that will be most relevant for customers trying to find it on their smartphone.

“You might strip out chunks of content and chunks of navigation and have two different versions of your site,” says Harris.

A key step in this exercise is to have your designer create and submit a mobile sitemap (distinct from a standard sitemap, which you should also have for your primary site) to Google, so that it knows which sections you’re displaying to mobile visitors.

“If you want to show different content to mobile users than what you do to desktop users, then make sure that you set up a mobile sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools,” says Optimising’s Stewart.

Once again, the presence of a mobile sitemap will indicate to Google that your site is optimised for mobile users, and it will direct smartphone traffic accordingly.

The use of XHTML or HTML5 when designing a mobile site, and the use of a mobile domain name (ie m.yourbusiness.com) will both help to indicate the suitability and relevance of a site to mobile search.

Locational listings

Despite the emphasis that Google now places on location in search, many small businesses continue to disregard the importance of having a Google Places listing. Now that people are searching for products and services while mobile, it’s more important than ever to put your business on the map.

“Remember that when people are looking for content on their mobile devices, they’re generally looking for locally based services and products,” says Harris.

Google Places gives businesses the ability to mark their location on Google Maps with content – reviews, videos and images – Having a comprehensive Places listing is not only a simple way of increasing your business’s presence in search, but can also help attract business from smartphone users.

“If someone’s doing a search on a mobile phone, and you’re set up on places, then Google will determine whereabouts you are based on the local tower the searcher is connecting to if it’s a 3G operation, and it will display content geographically close to them,” says Stewart.

Optimise for shorter terms

Whether you choose to have a separate mobile site designed (which is the more desirable option, especially if you need to streamline a large or ungainly desktop site), or your site has been coded to appear reasonably well on devices, it’s imperative to revise your target keywords to account for smartphone search queries.

“Typically, on mobile people use shorter key phrases or even just keywords, whereas on a website, you can get away with phrases, not just keywords,” says Bamboo’s Harris. “On a mobile device, it’s quite awkward typing a long phrase, so you must rank well on those shorter key phrases and those keywords.”

Unfortunately, shorter keywords and phrases tend to be more competitive in search, but Harris reiterates that it’s critical to account for the impatient typing thumbs of your smartphone-equipped target market.

“Think about how people truncate your particular search term on a mobile device,” he continues. “Those abbreviations can be used in your SEO as search terms.”

Meta-data

As with standard practice for search engine optimisation, businesses trying to boost their search traffic should understand how to use keywords in their mobile site’s meta-data.

“Google is going to use the same criteria for mobile search as it does for regular search. The difference being with mobile search, it’s going to want to display sites that match the relevancy with the search criteria, but also give the user a good mobile experience,” says Stewart.

Most smartphone operating systems will recognise phone numbers in text, allowing users to contact the business by simply pressing the contact number wherever it appears.

“Make sure you have the phone number in the description tag of the mobile version of your site, in the meta-description,” says Stewart.

Doing this will allow people searching for your business to dial you directly from search results, saving those searching for you contact details from the inconvenience of navigating through irrelevant information.

Contact the Web Designers Team today to find out how we can assist your business on the web

Nett Magazine

Still not sure or want to give it a crack for yourself? Read on…

Search engine marketing

Search engine marketing (SEM) services like Google’s AdWords let you purchase a text ad alongside the standard, ‘organic’ search results for a chosen keyword. Not only is this the quickest way to get to the top of search results, but it also helps you understand which keywords people are using to find your business online, and which of those most often result in sales.

David Duffield, CEO at search marketing company Outstanding ROI, explains that SEM lets businesses easily experiment with a wide range of keywords to see what works. With search engine optimisation (SEO), which is the process of improving organic search results, you’re required to focus on a much smaller selection of keywords. Improving your keyword knowledge with SEM helps to formulate a stronger approach with SEO.

“For SEO you generally focus on a handful of phrases, and you’re kind of locked into those,” says Duffield. “With PPC or SEM, you can really test out a wide number of niche phrases.”

Keyword rich domain

Having refined your selection of keywords, you need to use these strategically on your site to improve your organic search ranking.

Ideally, the domain name for your website will contain keywords that are core to your business. Some businesses even form their entire marketing strategy around a keyword-rich domain.

If this isn’t feasible, it’s worth investigating the availability of some domains that contain your keywords and having these redirect to your site. Site architecture

The way your site is laid out also impacts on search. Google favours sites arranged in layers rather than organised as a bundle of pages randomly linked together. From your homepage, visitors should be able to navigate to a series of category pages, which should link to pages dedicated to individual products.

In order to maximise the effect of this model, it’s important that each category page and each product page centers around or includes keywords that you want to target in search. For example, if you stock a particular brand, you should create a category page for that brand that links to individual pages for each of the brand’s specific products.

Also, the URL structure for your site should mirror the architecture, including keywords to denote each stage of the navigation. For example, a product page URL should take the form of yourcompany.com.au/brand/model.html, as opposed to yourcompany.com.au/category200_1/z7800.html. This makes the URL easier to read for visitors, and simpler to understand for search engines.

Keyword placement in meta-data/title tags

It’s common knowledge that search engines scour the text content of a page for keywords. This is why you should use relevant keywords throughout the copy on your site.

Keywords also need to be used in the HTML, or code, of each page. This can be accessed through the content management system of your site by selecting the ‘view source’ option. The use of keywords in this context is referred to as meta-data, as it provides the search engines with further information about what visitors are likely to find on the page.

There are three types of meta-data that are important for search. Meta-titles (denoted by a line of text wrapped in < t > … < /t > tags) act as the page’s title, and can be seen at the top of the browser toolbar after you’ve navigated to a page.

“This is displayed in the Google search results. When you do a search, and your website’s found, that’s the title that users will see when they go to your website,” says James Richardson, director of Optimising SEO and Design.

H1 tags (< h1 > for a primary heading, < h2 > for sub-headings) display as content headings on your site’s pages. Accordingly, search engines deem the content within these tags to be highly relevant to what the page is about, so they should contain the page’s target keywords.

Finally, the meta-description is used to describe the page to a search engine. It should accurately and concisely summarise its contents and purpose, and include relevant keywords.

Get a sitemap

An XML sitemap is a document that presents the layout of your website to Google in a format that’s easy to process. Every time your site is updated with a new page or a new blog post, it’s best to generate and submit a new sitemap to Google to alert it to the changes that have occurred. Although it is possible to do this manually, plug-ins are available for most content management systems that automatically create a new sitemap and send it to Google with each update.

“Whenever I create a new piece of content, this sitemap is auto-updated with the URL for that new blog post,” says Optimising’s Richardson. “That sitemap plugin – a small piece of software for WordPress, for example – then pings Google that there’s a new piece of content, so when Google crawls that sitemap, it can quickly update your new content into results. It just means that your content gets indexed a lot quicker than it would otherwise.” Content that targets keywords

An effective method of improving search results is to create and publish content around your target keywords. Having a blog on your site that is regularly updated with content relevant to both your business and your target customer’s interests will give the search engines more information to work with. If the content is actually useful to visitors, this strategy can also increase the number of links to your site, which helps search results. Link building

When trying to improve your search ranking, it helps to understand that search engines like Google are simply trying to find the most relevant results for their users.

Google’s algorithm isn’t able to read what’s on the page to judge how relevant it is for the term you’ve chosen to target. For this reason, search engines reward pages that have incoming links from other sites, as this implies that someone has found the content useful enough to share.

Google’s recent Panda update means the search engine now favours the quality over the quantity of links to your site.

“To show Google that you are the most relevant website to what people are searching for, it’s important that you are getting links from a high authority website,” says Optimising’s Richardson.

The quality of these links also depends on their context on the other site – whether the content of the two sites is related, and whether the link appeared naturally within content, rather than hidden away in comments or on a sidebar.

“You want to try and build links as naturally as possible, and some of the things that you should look at first is your existing relationships and commercial relationships with other businesses, other entities that may be in similar industries,” suggests Victor Navarro, content manager at search marketing agency Outrider. “Look within your own networks first and seeing if you can generate links that way.”

Location-based listing

Mobile search is becoming increasingly popular, so it’s essential that your business has a Google Places listing, and appears on Google Maps.

“The principles for a Google Maps listing are very similar to optimising your website for specific keywords. It works in a similar way to SEO,” says Optimising’s Richardson. “It’s a matter of making sure your listing is completely filled out. Make sure you fill out all the options. Uploading videos, putting images in there. Make sure you list all the services that you provide.”

Besides the benefits for mobile search, having a Places listing is beneficial as it provides another way of building a business’s presence in search with content and links.

Social media

Social media has never been hugely important for improving search rankings, used by most marketers as simply another touch point for your business online.

Regardless, Google has toyed with displaying Twitter posts, LinkedIn profiles and YouTube clips in search results, implying that social media will eventually play a bigger role in search. The company has also recently introduced the ‘+1’ button into search results, mirroring a similar function in its new social media service, Google+. The button allows searchers who are logged in to their Google accounts to recommend certain results to their contacts.

For more information on this function and how to use it in your rankings, read Google Announces Global Rollout of +1 Button.

Monitor your competitors

Keeping an eye on what your competitors are doing to improve their rankings is useful for both SEO and SEM, but particularly for the latter.

To supplement the ‘trial and error’ approach with SEM, tools like Keyword Spy can help you monitor how your competitors are using SEM to market themselves, and whether or not their approach is successful.

“You can have a look at their budget, their campaign, and also the length of time an ad’s been showing as a good indicator as to its success,” says Duffield. “People usually won’t continue to run an ad unless they’re getting a return.”

For SEO, it’s worth subscribing to competitors’ RSS feeds, and to take note of how they’re using content and social media to target keywords. What you find can be used to strike a point of difference with your own strategy, or to improve on the messages used in theirs.

NETT Magazine

Back by popular demand the Web Designers team are once again doing $99 website designs.

Sound too good to be true?

Lets be real, you’re not going to get a 100 page animated website with crazy custom functionality and a search engine marketing campaign. What you can get however is a custom designed website with one page of text and images promoting your business! Not everyone wants or even needs a fully fledged website, our web design team work along side marketing professionals that will cut through the garbage and speak to your customers in a language they understand.

Good things come in small packages

Check out these great examples of one page websites!

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Our new web design is a lot cleaner and easier to navigate than our old website. We’re using lots of great new CSS3 features and our HTML is the latest version HTML5 (no space).

Drop us a line and we’ll help bring your website up to date or if you’re new to the world of online business – let us walk you through it!