SEO - Content Writing Advice - Web Design

There is a simple process for launching the web site, assuming you have all of the aspects in place:

1. Obtain a domain name
2. Find a web host
3. Find a shopping cart
4. Find Merchant Account Service Providers
5. Develop the site
6. Launch the site
7. Market Your Site

Step 1: obtaining the domain name

Buying a domain name is a fairly simple process. But, choosing a domain name and one that will be saleable for your product is simply mind-boggling! How are you going to make sure that your domain name is short enough to put on business cards, stationery, and all types of published material that you have? How are you going to make sure you don’t choose a bogus domain name that’s difficult for everyone to type, thereby limiting your prospective clients? By following these rules:

Create a domain name that’s short, catchy, easy to type, and easy to remember.

It’s easier said than done for most industries! For example, in real estate, there are some domain names that simply should not have been registered in the first place. While the following are bad examples, they illustrate my first point:

The-best-real-estate-agents-in-all-the-land-that-sell-the-greatest-possible-houses-in-northwestern-weedpatch.com

That is a long domain name! There are several logistics problems with this kind of domain name. You’ll have a heck of a time getting it on business cards, stationery, and other forms of print collateral. In addition, it will be hard for potential clients to type. This means that clients that aren’t great typers will need to hunt and peck for each dash and letter, and make sure they get it right at the same time! It will be disastrous for your business.

A better example would be:

Google.com

Everyone knows what Google.com is: the number one search engine out there. Their domain name has everything that would be great in a domain name: easy to type, easy to remember, and easy to put on any and every type of stationery imaginable! This way, everyone (even those with limited typing abilities) can access the site without many problems at all.

1. Limit dashes to three or less.

Why is this? For potential clients visiting your web site, it’s a good thing to keep in mind. Say you had the domain name Austin-RealEstate-Agents.com. It’s pretty simple, catchy, but may not be completely memorable. This is because austinrealestateagents.com and austin-realestate-agents.com are completely different web sites, and therefore, completely different domain names. This will cause a few issues. One, say someone saw your web address and couldn’t remember if there were three dashes or two? If you hadn’t snagged the appropriate domain name variations, then some other competitor can obtain that domain name variation and steal all of that traffic by using the misspelling your domain name! In addition, it will confuse potential clients with who you really are. Are you austin-realestate-agents.com or are you austinrealestateagents.com?

For these reasons, it’s simply best to eliminate dashes from a domain name completely, and go with a dash-less domain name. It will make your life simpler and easier than dealing with a perpetual living headache when you attempt to put your long domain name on your business cards!

2. If you have a business site, make sure your domain name relates to your company in some way, or even better, use your company name as the domain name.

This is how people are going to identify you on the internet, so it’s imperative that you include some kind of word correlation that specifies your company name, product name, or a combination of both. If your company name is fairly short and easy to remember, especially if it’s even shorter when abbreviated, definitely use it as your domain name if it’s not already being used! Some great examples of short, easy to identify company names include:

Yahoo.com
Google.com
GeneralElectric.com
Mitsubishi.com
Toshiba.com

That’s it for domain name advice. Keep it simple enough that it’s easy to remember, easy to type, and easy to find for the general public, and you will do well.

Step 2: Find a web host

Finding a web host for your business can be one of the most costly mistakes you will ever make if you don’t know what you’re doing. Quite simply, a web host is a service that provides online real estate for web sites. A web host owns servers on which hard drives reside. These hard drives are used to store and allocate data to various customers that purchase such allocations. Then, these clients upload data to the hard drive, which then provides the data for all to see via a domain name. When the account is created, it’s linked to the domain name automatically, so you don’t have to worry about this part. In addition, a specific host will have a bunch of various widgets and additional technologies installed depending on the application the individual is purchasing the web site for.

For example, if someone is purchasing a web site for a shopping cart or other technically advanced implementation, one might want to have a web host that supports PHP version 4 and MySQL version 1.2 and above. Or, someone might want to have a windows server that supports ASP.NET applications. It all depends on what you want the web site to do eventually. Considering this discussion is related to e-commerce, I’m going to focus on Linux-based web hosts that allow for open source installations of shopping carts.

There are advanced solutions for those that wish to tinker around with the specific installations of technical implementations and working with their own “Server”. These are called Virtual Servers, and are significantly more expensive than regular Linux web hosts that provide space. Virtual Servers are full servers that allow root access, which means that the owner of the Virtual Server has full technical control over installing Linux Server distributions, CPANEL implementations, PHP Installs, MySQL installs, and other complex installations that will make a difference in how the web site operates. Virtual Servers are not for the technically intimidated, so if you don’t know what you are doing yet, I highly advise against pursuing a virtual server. Get your feet wet with a normal host, and if you decide that you want to enter the hosting industry after you get comfortable with the technical nuances, then upgrade to a Virtual Server.

Dedicated Servers

Dedicated servers are for those sites that consume a ton of bandwidth and need the storage for a myriad of data that no other competing web host can provide. The advantage of a dedicated server is that you don’t have to rely on the stability (or instability) of shared hosting, and you won’t be bogged down by another idiot on the same server hogging all the resources. Plus, you won’t be involved with the specific politics that most shared web hosts have. Let me explain.

Surely you’ve read the specific agreements when you signed up for a shared hosting account, right? Most agreements will have something to the effect of “We reserve the right to terminate your account or service for any reason.” This means that if you end up getting close to using 80% of your resources, the host may say “This guy’s using too much, he’s out.” There’s a downside to shared hosting if you are planning on operating a high traffic e-commerce site. The downside is that other sites will be on your server, and if another site goes down, then yours could go down if they decide to shut off the server due to significant resource hogs from the other web site. Just be certain of your needs and what you will need to cover your bandwidth, security measures, and budget.

3. Find a shopping cart

Shopping carts are the bane of the maintenance of the existence of a huge e-commerce site. They can be tedious to maintain, disastrous if handled inappropriately, but can be the greatest thing since sliced bread if used properly. The shopping cart can mean the difference between a sale and a sale decline. Once again, just like on the web site, usability comes into play. If your shopping cart makes it more difficult for someone to actually purchase something, you have a problem. And, if you use an open-source shopping cart, you absolutely MUST make sure that specific security measures are in place to be certain that no one can hack into your shopping cart for privileged credit card information.

The best thing about open-source shopping carts is that they’re free, they’re simple to install, and easy to maintain. Plus, if you have a reasonably competent web developer, they will be able to customize the appearance of your shopping cart for you, in addition to interfacing with your merchant account provider to ensure compatibility between authorization processing services.

4. Find Merchant Account Service Providers

These are places like Authorize.net that provide real-time, online processing services for your transactions. Typically, they will provide the link between your shopping cart, bank account, and will deposit funds appropriately. Watch out, however! There are those merchant accounts that are complete scams. They include over-the-top fees, sometimes up to 30% of the transaction price to provide the processing service. So, you NEED to read the contract first to make sure that you’re comfortable with paying the fees so that you don’t run into a rock and a hard place when trying to pay bills at the end of the month. If this isn’t something that you’re worried about, great! Otherwise, keep careful watch on the contract and research your potential merchant account service provider.

5. Develop the site

Now that you have the domain name, your meta structure, your host, your shopping cart setup, and your merchant account service provider setup (including the appropriate software), you want to proceed with the development of the site. Why is it you have to proceed at this stage instead of step number 1? Well, you did plan everything first before you started out as I discussed before, right? If you did, this is now the stage where you finally put everything together by working with your designer.

This is where you obtain your photos for your products, the snapshots that will show up on your web site. This is where you’ll have your designer/copywriter write the descriptions of the images that will show up on your site. This is where everything we’ve been working for will finally come into place.

6. Launch the site

Once the site is developed, tested for quality assurance, and proven to work on as many platforms as possible, it’s time to upload it to a sub-level test directory on your web host so the site can be tested and you can see how it works in real-time. As you verify that you’re happy with how the site works and you’re satisfied with your designer’s work, it’s time to sign off on the project. As the project is signed off, this is when your designer will launch the site and get it ready for public viewing and use.

This is where you can finally start marketing your web site to the search engines, optimizing your content, and move forward with keeping content on the site updated. Remember how I discussed making sure you have great content on your site? This is where it becomes the most important part of your site. The content will tell your visitors what your site is about, what you hope to accomplish with the site, and how to solve their problem. You did have your content writer come up with this already, correct?

7. Marketing Your Site

Once the site is launched, it is certainly not finished by a long shot! Now is the time to drive customers to your site so they can purchase your great products. At this point, you can develop a keyword strategy to target those keywords that clients are actively searching for. Then, you will need to develop a link strategy (for outbound and inbound links). In the meantime, you will want to continue to write fresh, relevant content for your site that will make visitors want to link to you!

First, about graphic images. Graphic images are perfectly fine for a web site. In fact, when used appropriately they can provide significantly excellent improvements on an otherwise bland page. That is, if they are used appropriately. I’m first going to go over the technical aspects of each image formats. Don’t worry! I won’t write extensively long verbose paragraphs of the bits and bytes of the image formats (even though I will provide them). Then, I’m going to go over some pitfalls to avoid if you plan on including extensive images on your site. Graphics and flash animations are great additions to a web site, but can be very bad for Search Engine Optimization purposes.

While not every format is going to be gone over in explicit detail, I will go over the formats you are going to want to know about when you’re dealing with the web and how they are used.

Photoshop (.PSD) – These are original Photoshop files. Adobe Photoshop is the software that is used most frequently by web designers to edit photos and create mockups of web site graphics. Most web site mockups will be saved in this format. However, if you’re creating logos or other print objects such as business cards, you will want to use .PSD. The reason why is that the .PSD file will contain all of the color, channel, and layer information in an uncompressed format. The process of compression gets rid of the color, channel, and layer information and compacts the file into a format that’s ready for web download.

JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) – This format was developed by, you guessed it, the Joint Photographic Experts Group. They are a group that develops quality standards for digital images. The JPEG format was one of the first formats to be developed to provide high quality, high color (16.4 million colors) images. They are used most frequently for photos and other images with high color saturation and rendition.

GIF (Graphical Interchange Format) – The GIF format is another compressed format. While it contains significantly less color information than JPEG (only 256 colors compared to the JPEG’s 16.4 million colors), it will render the images almost perfectly. The major thing that you want to be aware of when your designer is developing these images is to use a compression process that prevents lower quality on lower resolution monitors. Simply have them use the following GIF saving method in photoshop and you’ll be fine: GIF Options > Row Order > Normal (default for most all other options).

PNG (Portable Network Graphics) – The PNG format (pronounced PING) is known as the Portable Network Graphics format. This format is superior to GIF in that it includes alpha channels (variable transparency), gamma correction (cross-platform control of image brightness), and two-dimensional interlacing (a method of progressive displays) – at least it does according to the official PNG web site. PNG supports up to 48-bit TrueColor (superior to JPEG in that there is fully lossless compression resulting in no image degradation when compressed).

So when should you use these image formats?

PSD formats should be used when saving large image files and other web site mockups within Photoshop. This is especially so when working with files from your designer.

JPEG formats are great for photos, and should be the format of choice when you’re compressing a file from PSD to something smaller.

GIF formats are used when absolutely small file sizes are needed (such as in user interfaces and other graphics on a web site). This will provide for the best possible download speed for your web site visitors when optimized correctly.

PNG – basically the same as the reasons for using GIF above, just using a different file extension.

Should you include Flash multimedia presentations on a web site? Yes and no. While Flash can be an awesome thing and many of my past clients have wanted some Flash animations done, it is really bad for Search Engine Optimization purposes. The reason why is that search engines do not read the Flash files (or image files) and all they will see is a blank space. This is disastrous for those web sites that are attempting to provide value to the search engines, but the search engines won’t see it because of the fact there may be a bunch of blank space on the page. So what do you do?

For Flash, make sure that the Flash is located in a position on the web site that is read AFTER the content. If you recall from before, I mentioned that search engines read from left-to-right, top-to-bottom. So, create a table that provides the content in the left most table cell, with the Flash on the right most table cell. This will allow search engines to read the specific content FIRST (an absolute must) and they will index you accordingly.

Now, as far as images are concerned, if images are read as a blank space, how are search engines going to read what’s in the empty content? Easy. It’s called alternate text. Have you seen the beige text box that pops up when you move your mouse over an image? That’s called alternate text. Alternate text is the key to making sure that search engines know that an image is there. The best thing that you can do to help make your site more readable by the search engines is to include alternate text.in your images! Use keywords to describe the images. Such as: “image of product…selling for $2,000.00” instead of saying “Click here for product.” Using click here text, while it’s not inherently bad for the search engines, will be the bane of your potential client’s existence. Just make sure that you include keywords to describe the image, and you’ll be fine.

There is a reason why some extremely large web sites are at the top of the search engines, and one reason only: they have significant amounts of original content. Content is the seed upon which great web sites thrive. The more original content you have, the better. And that means original. This means that you have to actually do some legwork. You have to write the content unless you have hired a content writer or design team that includes a content writer. Even though this is going to add to the cost of your web site, it will pay for itself time and time again when it converts leads into sales.

Coming up with the content is not an easy task if you choose to go it alone, but it can be done. While these tips don’t really focus on a specific industry, it would behoove you to follow some of these tips. They will help you come up with excellent content that can provide the salivating information that your clients are going to love you for.

To come up with original content:

1. Ask yourself what your buyers want in your product, and give it to them. What can you offer them in the way of service that no one else can? What can someone that is buying from you expect? To answer some of these questions, you may have to ask your potential clients themselves. Once you have this information, you will be able to develop the specific content for each client situation.

Say for the sake of example that you’re in real estate. You might ask questions of your buyer clients such as: What home styles are you going to be interested in? What information do you want to see about homes in your area? What is the specific goal or end result you hope to achieve once you’ve obtained your home? Do you plan on adding onto your home later? If so, what kind of add-ons? (this would be great for content geared toward basic construction principles). Have you ever bought a home before? Did you know that there could be pitfalls to signing a contract with various agents? Did you know that there could be pitfalls to signing contracts for properties?

For your seller clients, you may want to ask some of the following questions: What do you expect to see on a web site when it comes to content for selling your home? How have you increased your curb appeal so far? Which top 3 web sites are your favorites and why? What made you choose your last agent online? What attributes of web sites do you find most attractive? Did you know that there are contract pitfalls for you as well? What information would you like to see on the web site in regards to those? Do you know what a 1031 Exchange is and how it can help you roll your capital gains into another property without having to pay taxes on them?

2. Write your content based on the information you obtained in step 1. Say you’re in real estate and you want to sell homes to your clients. Obviously, you will want to provide buyer and seller pages that will provide specific information about your specific product. The real estate questions were meant to be used as an example to come up with specific original content ideas. By modifying the above questions per industry, you will be able to come up with significant amounts of content that will stun your visitors and make sure they want to contact you.

Another important attribute of any web site is known as the principle of Call To Action. Basically, be principle states that there has to be some reason for the potential client to want to contact you on your web site. You want to have content so compelling and informative that it establishes you as an expert in your industry and your product. Not only will this allow you the privilege of getting to the top of the search engines, this will provide clients a reason to perform a positive call to action response. Before going further, let me elaborate on positive call to action and negative call to action. Positive call to action means that someone likes your site so much that they contact you using one of the specific methods of contact that you list on your site. You DO list your phone number, email, address, and have at least a contact form on your web site, right? Negative call to action simply means that the client leaves the site and goes elsewhere. You want to avoid negative call to action whenever possible, and make it as easy as possible for a client to contact you. A few do’s and don’ts when it comes to providing call to action on your web site follows:

DO allow a client easy access to your contact information. Provide it on every single page possible so that clients don’t have to hunt down the information on your web site. If that’s the first impression that they see on your site, how will they ever have confidence in your business?

DO provide your contact information in an easy to read format. For example, don’t provide contact information that’s the same color as the background.

DO provide as much contact information as possible. Create a tabular data format that includes your contact name, phone number, email address, and company address. Provide alternate phone numbers as well. If you’re able to, provide a toll-free 800 number for clients to call. Nothing increases the confidence in an internet company when they have a free 800 number, especially for those clients that are not local to your locale.

DO make sure that your contact information is easily visible (above the fold) on your web site. Name your navigation buttons so they’re easy to understand: Contact Me, Contact Form, or Email. Don’t make it harder for your client than it has to be.

DO NOT provide one method of contact. Provide alternate methods. Sometimes clients are not comfortable speaking over the phone at first, and prefer to use email. That’s especially true when it comes to providing just your company address: who in their right mind would use snail mail to send you a question? It’s insane. Just provide an email address and be sure to offer the courtesy to respond to your clients as quickly as possible. It’s the right thing to do and will help increase your lead conversions when you can answer questions quickly.

DO NOT place your contact information at the bottom of the page. You don’t want to have your client hunt for contact information when they’re in a hurry. They’ll simply move on to another web site that has much better access to contact information for the company.

DO NOT place your contact information on a hard-to-reach page. Make sure at least your email address is clearly visible and accessible on EVERY page of your web site. Think about it: would you want to contact a webmaster that forces you to hunt for fifteen minutes for contact information? I know I wouldn’t.

Other methods of call to action include:

Adding a contact or quote form to your homepage. This is one of the most effective methods of call to action. For clients that really like your site and potential services, they will want to contact you. Provide a contact form that allows clients to fill it out as easily and as quickly as possible. Request minimal contact information such as: their first and last name, their mailing address, their email address, and phone number. Also, provide a small text area that allows them to input their comments.

Providing a showcase of three – five of your best and cheapest products or services on your homepage. Think about it: if clients can see immediately what you sell and the best possible options for them, they will want to purchase from you. This kind of call to action will pique their interest and desire to click further into your web site and find out more about the products that you offer.

Obviously not everyone is going to be moved by the above techniques. The above techniques, though, are meant to provide a mitigated risk against everyone simply clicking out of your site due to frustration. The three simple rules, to reiterate, are:

1. Provide high quality content
2. Provide your contact information in easy to reach places on your web site
3. Make it as easy as possible for clients to navigate your site.

While web development is technically more complicated than the above steps, they will provide you with a guideline to follow when you’re speaking with your web designer. It will help to clearly articulate what you want while at the same time allowing you to rest easy knowing that your site will turn out to be a high quality web site.