WebStrategies - website optimisation and search engine optimisation (SEO) Auckland, New Zealand » starting a website

Should you use free website hosting?

Webstrategies — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:00:05 +0000

There are many companies internationally that provide free website hosting, but care should be taken when using them for the following reasons.

Performance issues– many free website hosting providers have an extremely large pool of clients, which may effect the performance of their servers.
Reliability of services – what are their uptime Vs downtime stats?
Support – can you get hold of them by phone or email if needed?
Band width and volume – be sure you will get enough bandwidth and storage volume. Know what they are offering and what the costs are.
Backup and redundancy – do the providers of free website hosting backup their web servers and databases regularly, and then can they RESTORE it if needed?
Location – where exactly are their servers? You should host your website in the country of your target market if possible. Google checks this.
Their advertising – do the providers of free website hosting require you to feature their advertising on your website anywhere?
Redirects – be sure that the free website host doesn’t use any redirects as part of their services that might prevent Google finding or indexing your website
Bad neighbourhoods – avoid any hosting company that hosts spammers or link farm websites. If their servers get blocked, you are in trouble.

Author: Ashley Bryan
Webstrategies
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Checklist for starting a website

Webstrategies — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 01:50:45 +0000

Domain name – when starting a website you should research and investigate possible domain names for your website. Your domain name is important in terms of intuitiveness for your potential customers to remember, and also to reflect your business name or services/products. It is also a key factor for top rankings on Google.

Target market – where and who are they? Your website should speak to them, in terms they understand.

Design – your design should reflect your business branding and philosophies.

Content – what information and functionality do you need to include in your website?

Hosting – locate a company who can provide professional website hosting services for you. WHERE your website is hosted geographically is also very important for Google.

Cost – ensure your website development cost is within your budget and that you will get a Return On Investment (ROI).

Marketing – before starting a website, determine how you are going to market your website, both online and offline.

Google – you need to get found on Google, so your website needs to be built so that it is Google-friendly.

Author: Ashley Bryan
Webstrategies
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FAQ: Why doesn’t my Web site rank very well on Google?

Webstrategies — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:01:24 +0000

I’m often asked what the key factors are that determine the success of a website on Google. There can be a lot of reasons why your site is not ranking very well in search engines, but some of the reasons are more important than others. Here’s a quick rundown:

1. Your website is too young. Google measures the age of all websites and assigns more value (PageRank) to websites as they get older. Age is a measure of business stability, which means a more valuable result for people doing searches.

2. Your keyword placement is not right. Bottom line: your website can’t be found on Google if the search phrases used isn’t in your website. If it is there, then it has to be placed correctly in the page eg Title tag, page headings, page content, image tags. If your keyphrases are in text (i.e. not inside an image) and emphasised for your human visitors, then Google will pick them up.

3. You have a low level of quality websites linking into yours. If another website owner places a link on their website to yours, Google considers this a “vote” for your website. The more links in the better, but the better quality websites linking to yours the better.

4. Regularly updated content. Google will keep coming back to your website and re-indexing it. If a regular frequency of updates for your website is measured, then this contributes to your page rank. Websites with good, fresh, up to date content is good for people searching on Google, so Google values it.

5. Technical barriers to Google. Make sure your website is Google friendly and that there is nothing in place which is potentially stopping Google from finding all your content. Website made in Flash still do not perform well on Google.

Of course each of these gives rise to a whole area of website optimisation and management but taken as a whole, these are the key factors which influence the success of your website on Google.

Author: Ashley Bryan
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CASE STUDY: Corporate Cabs

Webstrategies — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:07:02 +0000

About the client:

Corporate Cabs provide premium chauffeur driven taxi services in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Queenstown.

Services:

Taxi service
Airport transfers
Limousine Hire
Wedding car hire
Corporate Tour Service

The task:

Corporate Cabs undertook a recent rebuild of their website www.corporatecabs.co.nz. Webstrategies was tasked with assisting to ensure that the new website was launched in an as optimised state as possible. A particular challenge was to ensure that the new website was optimised for phrases using the word “taxi”. The website currently performed well on Google for search phrases using “cab”, but not for “taxi”, and this was a requirement.

Work undertaken:

Webstrategies provided input at key stages of the website development cycle: design stage, content writing stage, and launch phase:

1. Design stage: advised on content placement: key features, calls to action and user pathway start points. Reviewed visitor activity of existing (old) website and factored this into new content planning
2. Content writing phase. Draft content was a reviewed and optimised for relevant keyphrases that had been identified using keyword research.
3. Launch phase. Prior to launch a full technical analysis was undertaken to ensure the website met best practice for Google friendliness.

The results:

Within 10 days of launch the website performed in the top 5 Google NZ results for searches on the phrases “book a taxi online” and “call for a taxi”. Visitor levels from Google had risen by 74% over the old website.

——————–

Testimonial:

“
Hi Ashley,

Just a quick note to say thanks for all your help with our website. Since employing the services of Webstrategies to oversee and advise us on the development and implementation of our new website we have already seen an increase in traffic. Our web developer also commented on how easy it was to work with you.

I look forward to implementing stage 2 of our programme in the near future.

Regards

Colin Samson I Chief Executive I Corporate Cabs Ltd
www.corporatecabs.co.nz
“

Noindex Meta tag versus robots.txt disallow – which to use?

Webstrategies — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 09:23:35 +0000

It’s easy to think that both the noindex Meta tag and the robots.txt disallow command appear to do the same thing: stop a page being listed on search engines. But there’s more to it than that.

Robots.txt, disallow:

A search engine bot will recognise that the page exists but not index the content, therefore the page URL may still display in search results, but with no other content displayed.
A search engine bot will not crawl the page, therefore will not find any content that you might want it to eg other Meta tags, or links out of the website.
Page can still accrue PageRank.

Format:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /page.php

Noindex Meta tag:

A search engine bot will not index the page and the page will not show up in the search engine results.
A search engine bot still crawls page and find content.
Page can still accrue PageRank.

Format:

= the page will not be in search results but Google can still follow the outbound links in the page.

= the page will not be in search results and Google will not follow the outbound links in the page.

= the page will be ignored ie the same as

Author: Ashley Bryan
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FAQ: What is the Google bot?

Webstrategies — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 09:54:19 +0000

Google Bot is an automatic tool used by Google using a mathematical process to continually crawl, just like a spider, through web pages and websites to find new and updated content to add to its database. At the same time it removes old links to dead pages or websites thus keeping the “index” of websites that it has listed, as up to date as possible. In short the Google bot checks your website and tells Google what it is all about so that Google can then present your website to people who are doing searches using keywords and phrases.

An important point is that the bot only reads text. So a page with no text will not perform well on Google because Google has nothing upon which to determine what that page is about. A page that does have text and so can be read by the Google bot will most probably get “indexed” and listed in the database. Of course it’s logical to then realise that if Google bot reads text to gain an understanding of what your page is about then it is reading words and phrases and so it’s important to ensure your relevant and desired words are in the page where Google can find them (giving rise to Search Engine Optimisation or SEO).

You can tell if the Google Bot has visited your website by looking at your website statistics supplied by your web host or by joining Google’s Webmaster Tools, which is a service provided free by Google. These tools will tell you how often the Google bot returns and checks your website. The bot follows links so the more links into your website the more often the bot will return.

What does all this mean to you? Well, it’s really important when your website is designed to ensure that the Google bot can find all of your pages. And when writing your content ensure that meaningful and relevant phrases are included and placed in the right places on your pages for Google to find. Quality keyword-rich content with relevant links into your pages is what the Google bot needs, and that is what you need in order for your website to perform well on Google.

Author: Stuart Wilkerson
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Finding best keyphrases for your website

Webstrategies — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 03:28:33 +0000

The first step to establishing what keyword and phrases you should optimise your website for is to establish and understand what its goals and objectives are.

This is best done before you even build your website, but is also extremely valuable for existing websites, as part of your optimisation and fine-tuning efforts. Your website’s goals could be to:

Increase enquiries from your website from level X to level Y
Increase sales from your shopping website from $X to $Y
Increase the rate at which people download your e-book or other file(s)
Increase sign-ups to your newsletter

Understanding the goals of your website leads on to the crucial task of determining the keyphrases that are relevant to your website and business.

These keyphrases need to be relevant to your target market, business, industry and location and are essential for good performance on Google. They are the foundation of what is commonly called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

An excellent first step to determining what the keyphrases for your website should be is to do a search for your products and services on Google, just like your target market will do. Keep refining your search until you get a set of results in which you would like your website to appear, and there, you have determined one of your keyphrases. You’ll possibly see your competitors listed there.

Work your copy to be relevant to that phrase, and ensure that you have the keyphrases on the page in the right places like title tag, Meta tags and in H1 headings. And of course measure! There are plenty of free SEO tools around that will tell you your placings on Google for your keywords and phrases, and your website statistics will tell you how successful your newly identified keyphrases are at driving visitors to your website.

Author: Ashley Bryan
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Does two home page URLs harm PageRank?

Webstrategies — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 02:38:02 +0000

I sometimes get asked the question: “does having both / and /home for a website create “duplicate” home pages and cause Google to blacklist a site, or does it just lower a site’s page rank?” Here’s my take on this issue.

Any time two URLs point to the same page there exists a potential duplicate content issue for Google as they only want to display unique results in their result pages (SERPs). Therefore a unique URL for each page on your website IS desirable. But it’s extremely unlikely that the site would be blacklisted because as we can imagine, millions of websites would be blacklisted if this were the case. It’s possible that there could be “penalties”, especially if you a situation like this:

www.website.com

http://website.com

www.website.com/home

http://website.com/home

all pointed at the home page. Then there could be an issue because Google will generally initially consider the first valuable version of any page that it finds and disregard subsequent ones so the real issue is damage to, or dilution of, your PageRank. We know that valuable inbound links is one of the factors that helps to push up PageRank, so if you have some of your inbound links going to URLs that Google disregards (i.e. one of the above) then you’re diluting your inbound link value and, while that might not cause a real lowering of your website’s rank in the SERPs, then you are probably not getting as high up the Google rankings as you might otherwise. Plus of course we don’t want the ones that Google disregards, or holds down in the results, to include the primary URL (i.e. www.website.com).

Best practice is to 301 redirect all other variations of the URL to your main URL, if possible. There is a great article here that shows you several methods for correctly creating 301 redirects as well as a link to a redirect checker tool.

Author: Ashley Bryan
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Checklist for starting a website

Webstrategies — Fri, 29 May 2009 21:10:15 +0000

Starting a website either to support your existing business, or to be the business in its own right, involves a number of factors and considerations that you need to understand. Here is a check list of things to consider:

• Domain name – when starting a website you should research and investigate possible domain names for your website. Your domain name is important in terms of intuitiveness for your potential customers to remember, and also to reflect your business name or services/products. It is also a key factor for top rankings on Google.
• Target market – where and who are they? Your website should speak to them, in terms they understand.
• Design – your design should refelct your business branding and philosophies.
• Content – what information and functionality do you need to include in your website?
• Hosting – locate a company who can provide professional website hosting services for you. WHERE your website is hosted geographically is also very important for Google.
• Cost – ensure your website development cost is within your budget and that you will get a Return On Investment (ROI).
• Marketing – before strating a website, determine how you are going to market your website, both online and offline.
• Google – you need to get found on Google, so your website needs to be built so that it is Google-friendly.

WebStrategies - website optimisation and search engine optimisation (SEO) Auckland, New Zealand » starting a website

Should you use free website hosting?

Related Blog Posts

Checklist for starting a website

Related Blog Posts

FAQ: Why doesn’t my Web site rank very well on Google?

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CASE STUDY: Corporate Cabs

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Noindex Meta tag versus robots.txt disallow – which to use?

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FAQ: What is the Google bot?

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Finding best keyphrases for your website

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Does two home page URLs harm PageRank?

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Checklist for starting a website

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