| Promotion is the key to optimising the return on your
Internet activities. |
| PROMOTION GOAL: Get
customers to come and visit your site. |
| This advice is critical if you want to ensure placement of your site
within the top 20 listings when someone does a keyword search. |
| Important factors in site design:
We assume here that you need to understand the issues in site design so that you can make
a decision whether to learn about the HTML markup language and do the site design yourself
or give Comag the commission. |
| Web Site Address: - This is
critical. Yahoo, and some other search engines, use the site address as one of the key
criteria when determining who gets listed first. |
| If you have control over your domain name, then make sure it is
descriptive of your web site. For instance, if you have a business that offers travel
services, optimally, you would want to have a domain name of www.travel.co.uk.
However, since most of the obvious names are already in use, you may want to use
derivatives of travel, such as www.all-travel.co.uk or www.budgettravel.co.uk.
Both of these would work well. (Note, other keywords can be used such as
www.vacation.co.uk or www.resort.co.uk ). |
| If you don't have control over your domain name, (monthly costs are
therefore the limiting factor) you can still have your key attribute in the name. For
instance, if your site was being hosted by www.comag.net , you could
request a site address of www.travel.A1sale.co.uk
or www.travel.A1panel.com . All words
in your site address (URL) are used by the search engines. |
| MetaTags : / Meta Tag Title
/ Description / Key Words / Alt Tags / ) |
| Meta Tags are html coding that is not displayed by the browser and is
used to supply information about a page. |
| There are at least 10 important search engines and
directories and all have different word-selection criteria and different ways of assessing
your site. |
| Meta tag example : |
| Title -
(although the page may have a visible title it can also have a hidden meta tag title
hidden in the html code). The meta-title is one the the most important Meta Tags.To put it
simply, keep the title short. Many search engines prioritize rankings by relevancy (see
caution below). Also, your title should be descriptive of your site. For example, if your
travel company's name is John, Paul and Associates, you would not want to title your site
"John, Paul and Associates". A better title would be "Air Travel and
Vacation Services". This title has some of the most common words used in searches for
travel and it describes what your web site has to offer. (Don't worry, I am not saying to
leave your company name off your web site. Definitely include it, just don't put it in the
title if it doesn't describe your site.) |
| Caution, don't get carried away and think you can just
load up your document with keywords (spamming). Many search engines use a weighting scheme
where they determine a relevancy percentage based on the search word entered and the total
words. Some even penalise you if it looks like your spamming. |
| (There is much more to say about meta tags and not enough room to cover
it all here.) |
| Opening Paragraph - It is very
important to have an opening paragraph. There are several reasons for this, 1) Search
engines like Excite don't use Meta Tags when displaying your site description; 2) Search
engines like Lycos place a heavy weighting on words in the first paragraph; and 3) Search
engines like Alta Vista look at how soon key word matches are made in your document. You
don't want your site to come up in the top 5 of a search and have a description like
"336 Manchester Road Deepcar Sheffield UK S36 2RH Advertising........".
How can you entice someone to come to your site with a description like this being
displayed! |
| Body Text - The only advice we can
offer here is to make sure that you have descriptive text in your site. If you have a home
page that is comprised mainly of graphics and your are relying on your Meta Tags to get
good search engine rankings, good luck. You may be lucky on a couple of engines, but your
odds greatly increase when the search engines can find matches throughout
your web page. |
| Hidden Words - You can add
additional hidden words into your web page by using the HTML comment tag. |
| Spell Check - There are so many
web pages out there that have misspelled words that it is pathetic. If you don't have a
spell checker on your HTML editor, you need to get one. Nothing shouts
"unprofessional" more than misspelled words. |
| Frames - Be wary of using frames.
Some screen types display them differently as do browsers. Also, some search engines won't
index the page at all or will go to the alternate non-frame page. Some search engines that
do index framed pages may only index one frame. Consequently, it is hard to achieve a good
overall rating using frames. |
Content - Is it
internet material? Because there are over 50 million web sites out there, you need to make
sure people have a reason to come visit your web page. Following are the best reasons to
ensure a successful web site: |
 Are you selling a service or product at a great price? |
| Are you selling a service or product that is hard to
get? |
| Are you offering information that may be valuable to people? |
| Are you providing a free service or product? |
| Are you offering a convenience to the consumer? |
| Are you offering something fun or entertaining? |
| Make sure you give people a good reason to come to your site. Otherwise,
it won't matter if your listed at number 1 on all the search engines, no one will respond. |
| Eye Appeal - Your web page needs
to be easy to look at and read. Sites with a lot of text on a gray background get very
boring. Whereas, sites with a lot of graphics, color and varied font type are more
entertaining. (This almost goes without saying.) Beware, don't overdue it - see the load
time section below. |
| Load Time - This is a key
category. Many people on the net surf, which means that they move around a lot. If a site
takes more than 30 seconds to load, they move on unless, they are very interested and have
come to the site specifically. Most net users have a 28.8kbs modem or below. Therefore you
should try to keep the file size for each page around 20k-30k maximum (this includes
graphics)! If you provide a link to a site and specify in advance that it is a 92k full
screen picture, then the person knows, prior to loading, that there will be a wait. |
| The problem many web designers make is that they design their sites using
ISDN access or better, and they forget how slow the modem is of the common user. As such,
they design their sites with a lot of animation, Plug-Ins or large graphics and they take
fffooorrreeevvveeerrr to load. We are telling you, most people won't wait - they move on.
Consequently, you may be getting 100 hits a day, but no-one stays long enough to get
beyond the first page. (Editors note: that is why this report is broken into 4 parts.) In
contrast, don't get carried away by having zillions of small pages (see simple navigation
below). |
| The server where your site resides has an impact on load time, too. It is
often well worth the money to ensure that your server has high quality, fast and direct
connections to the internet. Additionally, the server needs to be configured to handle 3-5
times the traffic it normally receives, to minimize any delays during peak periods. (To
find out about our hosting service, click here.) |
| Simple Navigation - Make it easy
for people to find their way around your site. Nothing is more frustrating that getting
lost in a web site (this is similar to never getting a real person on an automatic
telephone answering system. |
| What we suggest is to have plenty of links between
pages in your site, as well as a master navigation place on each page. We recommend the
master navigational section is at the bottom of the page. If it's at the top, a search
engine may use it as part of the description of your site and if it's at the side of the
page, the viewing window becomes too small. (Check out the bottom of this page to see an
example.) |
| There are at least 10 important search engines and
directories and all have different word-selection criteria and different ways of assessing
your site. |
| Regular re-registration (after changes) gives you a better
and improving search presence. |
| Comag has a proven
history of performing this task for our clients. |
| We register you with the 10 most important
engines and we know that our methods produce results! |
| Please contact Comag now
to avoid missing out on this exiting new business medium. |
Options & Prices:  Price Breakdown |
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| Please contact us and we will be happy to provide more
details. |
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| We are operating a Spam avoidence system. |
| In the first instance, please use the
following temporary |
| email address, if you wish to contact us. |
| We will reply giving you a permanent,
simple-to-remember |
| email address for future contacts. |
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In the first instance please
email:  |
|
|
57 Carr Rd Deepcar
Sheffield S36 2RH |
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|
last update 15 March 2007 |
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