When we design a website for a business we often think that the most important terms are those that are associated with what the business does so if the website is for an electrician we think about all the elctrical terms that people might enter into Google in attempt to find a website associated with an electrician.

If it’s a website for a plumber we think of plumbing terms and if we’re building a website for a mechanic we think of terms associated with car repairs and car servicing. And that’s all fine but we forget that the people who are searching for those terms usually want a local business so they want to see results businesses near them.

In fact Google understands that need and even if the person searching doesn’t specify a location Google will show them websites that usually belong to businesses that are close to the person doing the search. But how does Google know that a website might be relevant to someone searching in Hervey Bay for example.

Well when Google crawls a web page it looks for a street address … a suburb … a postcode … and a telephone number and from that information Google can tell if a website really is relevant … in terms of locality … to the person doing the search.

So what do we often overlook when we’re building a website for a small business that draws its client base from a local area? We forget the address and the postcode and the phone number. Sure, we might include it on a generic contact page but that’s simply not enough.

If you want your website to have a good chance of ranking well in the search results that are relevant to a specific area then you MUST include the address, postcode and phone number of the business in text (not as an image) on every single page of the website … and it’s best if you show those details somewhere prominent.

Hiding it down at the foot of the page isn’t good enough.

We’ve also been on the receiving end of some spam from a small business here in Hervey Bay that’s obviously taken that advice so I thought I should take a few moments to point out some basic facts about email marketing just in case you’re thinking about doing some.

Email marketing can be effective
There’s no doubt that email marketing can be effective … you can make sales by advertising your products via emails to potential buyers. However recent figures from a survey done by Marketing Sherpa show that email marketing may not be as effective as you might think.

Marketing Sherpa surveyed 1500 online marketers and they found that for every 100 emails those surveyed sent out only four would result in sales. Around 25% might actually open the email … 14% might click from the email through to your website but only 4% would actually buy whatever it was that was advertised in that email.

Where did you get your email list from?
We recently received some email spam from a local business and when I contacted them to find out where they got my email address from I was curtly informed that they had compiled their email list by phoning local people and asking them if they would like to receive emails from this business.

Well no one from that business actually phoned us and a friend who got a similar email from the same business never got a phone call either.

Many small businesses think that it’s quite ok to go trawling through local online directories for links to the websites of local businesses so that they can grab the contact email addresses and add them to the list they’re compiling.

Compiling a list in that way will not protect you from prosecution if someone lodges a spam complaint with the ACMA.

Opt-in and Double Opt-in lists
If you want to compile a list of people who would be interested in receiving marketing emails from you then build your list the right way. Have a link on your website asking people to sign up for your emails … a list compiled in that way is known as an opt-in list. There’s software available that will help you compile such a list.

It’s always a good idea to add another layer of protection for yourself and move up from a simple opt-in list to a double opt-in list. The double opt-in list works in the same way as the first list does but before it adds a person’s email address to your list it emails them and asks them to confirm that they want to be on your email list.

If they don’t confirm by clicking a link in that email then their email address is not added to your email list. Once again, there’s software that will help you compile and manage such a list.

Opt-out
Once you’ve compiled your email list the compliance work isn’t over yet. Every time you send out an email to your lists it must contain a link that allows the recipient to remove their name from your email list.

If you don’t include a working opt-out link you’re in breach of the laws governing the sending of emails within Australia and the penalties are harsh.

For more information about how to avoid being branded as a spammer when you want to email people to offer them your products go to the ACMA website and follow the links on the left-hand side of the screen.

Email marketing is basically a two-edged sword. If you do it right it can work for you … if you do it wrong the fines and penalties can destroy your business.

1. When a stunning view is part of the attraction for people to come and spend money at your business why wouldn’t you include at lease one image of that view in your website?

2. When your address and phone number are important for people who want to come and spend money at your business why would you only display them on one page? Why wouldn’t you display them boldly on every single page of your website … especially when the web designer takes up a great chunk of real estate on every page to display his business name that links straight to his website?

It sometimes makes you wonder who and what some web designers were thinking of when they sat down to build a site for a paying client.

Over the last few weeks we’ve had a number of enquiries from local businesses who have been dissatisfied with the work done on their websites by other local designers.

These people have spent anywhere from $1500 to $5000 dollars on sites that have turned out to be absolute failures. They neither rank well in the search engines or make sales or generate leads and the sites owners come to us in the hope that we can work some miracle without costing them any more money.

Sadly we can’t because our time is just as valuable as any other small business and all too often the site designs are so bad that they need to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch. Even if the design can be recycled the cost of re-writing the text on the site is often more than the site owner can afford.

So if you’re about to pay a web designer to build a website for your business you’ll find 85 Reasons Why Website Designers/Developers Keep SEOs in Business in invaluable read for it will give you some guidelines that will help you to avoid wasting money on a clueless web designer.

Some of the reasons given in the article:

3. They develop navigational menus that are invisible to search engines

5. They ask the client to provide them with website copy (it’s the designer who should develop the text based on the concepts that you give them).

6. They have the client provide them with what pages they want on their website.

10. They think that SEO is submitting (the site) to search engines.

12. They put the same title on every page of the website.

18. They find it easier to use paid search.

I could go on with more but then I’d be breaching the fair-use rules of copyright so just let me encourage you to follow the link and read those 85 points. Unfortunately we’ve come across every one of them in the last few weeks.

This website owner had employed someone else … a friend I think she said … to build an online store for them and now that the store was complete they wanted us to do some SEO work for them. One quick look at the site was enough to tell us that there was going to be very little in the way of search engine optimisation that we could do for the site.

The site was built using a shopping cart script that we’re quite familiar with and it is possible to make sites built with this script do really well in the search engines but ….

To make that happen the search engine optimisation people have to be there from the start. They need to have some say in the overall design of the site and not be left out till the very end because by then it’s just way too late. With this particular script there are too many important variables that become non-variable once the site is ready to go live and there’s very little search engine optimisation anyone can do from that point on.

And that’s why we turned this work away. It would have been a waste of our time and the clients money to have pretended otherwise. I did point out to the client though that she would find plenty of people who would claim that they can do things to improve the search engine rankings for the site but they were all snake oil salesmen.

So remember, when you’re having a new site built be sure to include the search engine optimisation people right from the start because once the design work is finished it’s way too late to start thinking about achieving a good position in any of the major search engines.

Are your images and photos really enhancing your website or are they actually detracting from the impact of your site?

Way too many people try to save money by taking their own photographs for a business website. Sure they pay a professional web designer to design the site but they think that their photos are good enough to display on their new site.

Unfortunately all to often the photos are not as good as the business owner might think. Just recently we were given a number of photos to include in a basic website for a client. The lighting and the sharpness were all fine but most of them had problems:

• the subject was too far from the camera
• there was clutter in the foreground that drew your eye away from the subject
• the background was littered with things that shouldn’t have been there or distracted the viewer - an upturned chair – a car park full of cars – doors that were left ajar
• there were thing to the side of the photographer that found their way into the photographs and couldn’t be cropped out
• important items in the background were not centred in the image – a sign with the client’s business name was off-centre so not all of the name appeared in the image.

These are all things that a professional looks for when setting up to take the photos and they’re all things that do nothing to enhance a website.  If you want to take photos for your website then be sure to look before you take the photo and remove the junk that is going to get in the way.

And don’t be afraid to use a professional photographer rather than take some happy snaps yourself and hope for the best.

Here at Total Website Management and Copy Text Online we’re pleased to be able to say that we work with Freddie and Gordon Kitson from Vizionz and they are two of the best commercial photographers in Hervey Bay.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase rather than just the words that are in that phrase? We have a lot of discoveries in that area that are going to roll out in the next little while.”

Search and gaining good rankings for keywords and keyword phrases that are important to your business is going to get interesting this year … you have Eric’s word on that.

But it seems that it’s us Luddites who are having the last laugh because with all the new widescreen monitors that are coming out  people are finding that websites with page widths based on percentages are not looking good … in fact they’re looking downright aweful.

You’ll find an interesting article about what does and doesn’t work in the latest monitors here.

Most of the team have been focused on the rebuild of an online shop for a new client. They did have a an online shop built by someone who has since disappeared but that was such a mess of poor design and a hopeless shopping cart programme that the only solution was to rebuild it from scratch and that will go live in the next day or so.

While they have been busy on that I’ve been tied up with search engine optimisation work for several overseas clients. I even got to write the outline of an SEO e-book that will be coming out in the United States in the next month or so.

That was fun and a challenge because the search engines are beginning to make some big changes in the way they crawl and index websites and keeping up with that new information has been almost a fulltime job all by itself.

So we really have been one very busy web design studio in Hervey Bay and that’s going to continue well into the foreseeable future. But then we don’t mind that because all the clients we work for are seeing a real return on their investment and happy clients are what we always strive for.

Unfortunately we couldn’t make one guy happy … he had his website built by another designer here in town and I really did feel for him when he told Toni and me this week:

“I really wish I had found you guys before I went and wasted all that money on a site that’s just not working for me.”

Sadly that’s not the first time we’ve heard that lament – just before Christmas another potential client found that the cost of correcting all the mistakes made by another person in Hervey Bay who thought that they could design websites was going to be as much as it would cost to tear it down and start all over again.

The moral of that story is that if you want a website designed here in Hervey Bay … or anywhere else for that matter … then shop around and talk to people who have already done business with the designer you’re thinking of using.

Just to add to all the mayhem we decided that it was time to upgrade a server over in the United States. The old server was still working well but to keep up our standard of service we decided that it was time to make the move to a better server now before the old one began to break down.

Server moves in days gone by have been traumatic and a lot of work but fortunately these days server moves can be almost seamless. However the wait between shifting everything to the new server and waiting to see it come online can be as traumatic as waiting for a baby to be born … anything and everything can go wrong.

Fortunately this baby was born with only a couple of minor glitches and they were fixed within minutes of the new server going live.

So it’s been a crazy time but in the middle of all that craziness we got a letter from the Gayndah and District Historical Society. We did their Gayndah Museum site last month and they wrote to tell us:

“The members who have computers and have had a look all agree that the colour schem you have chosen is spot on and the layout is very easy to follow and appropriate.”

We love it when a plan comes together!