Getting Better On The Internet

Don’t just admire it, measure it !

After go-live, make sure you know how well your site is working for you. The server that hosts your site logs every request it receives. The log files are very technical and unfriendly to read, but can be processed to answer key questions on the effectiveness of your site.

The first question to answer is, “how many people are visiting my site ?”. This is usually given as the number of unique visitors, or as the number of sessions. A session means a visit to your site : 10 sessions can be one person visiting 10 times, or 10 people visiting once. For technical reasons, its not always possible to tell these two apart.

More advanced reports can give an insight into your visitors thinking when they came to your site, and precisely measure the effectiveness of on-line advertising. For example

Help your clients to find you - Search Engines

Search Engines can be a valuable part of your marketing. They are national or international, and their results are targeted at people interested in your product. Creating a web site and getting into the search engines can be cheaper than buying an ad in a paper directory.

There are three major search engines :

They all work in the same way : they send out robots or ‘spiders’ that run round the web, following every link they can find. It’s also possible to submit your site for their attention. The robot records all the content of your site in a database. The content is indexed by keywords, and given a relevancy ranking per keyword. When someone searches for a keyword then a higher relevancy ranking makes your pages appear higher in the list.

The search engines all rank differently, and all keep their algorithms a closely guarded secret, but they all follow the same principles. They read the page content : words rank higher if they are repeated, or in headings. They also look at every other part of the page : the title, the name, hyperlinks, images.

They pay little or no attention to the meta-data keywords provided behind the scenes, but they pay great attention to links. Inward and outward links to other sites that rank highly will increase your ranking. That’s why directories feature so much.

Be careful, as there are some web design techniques that block the search engine spiders, and so damage your page ranking. For example, the spiders cannot read image files, so do not include their content in rankings.

Winning with Search Engines 1 – Work your way to the top

A whole new industry called Search Engine Optimisation – SEO – has grown up around optimising sites to get good rankings, by giving the engines what they want. Our particular offering is explained here.

Remember that a good ranking is not permanent. As other sites improve, and ranking algorithms change, your site might slip back down the rankings.

Avoid any tricks that try to fool the search engines, by making the site appear differently to them than to human users. If they detect this, or even suspect it, they will bar your site.

Winning with Search Engines 2 – Buy your way to the top

There are 2 ways to buy an appearance in a search engine : sponsored links, and pay-per-click (“PPC”) adverts. Sponsored links appear at the top of the page, before the search results, and PPC down the right hand side. Sponsored links tend to be expensive, but PPC is cheap and effective : our explanation of how to it works is here.

There’s a well known saying in advertising, “I know half my advertising is wasted – but I don’t know which half !” PPC solves that problem, by giving a direct measurement of reader response.

PPC can even be used to road-test advertising copy. Before running an expensive newspaper ad, choose the 2 best headlines, and run them as PPC ads for a few days. The response will tell you exactly which one they prefer.

Keeping your name in their mind

Email is a cheap and easy way of keeping your name in your clients mind, and keeping them up-to-date with your business. The emails can be personalised, and have an attractive design, like postal direct mail. Our particular offering is described here.

Remember, sending spam is illegal. You must have the recipients permission to send, and give them a way to unsubscribe from the mailing list.

We hope you have found this briefing useful. The final section Trading Online is about e-commerce. The first section, Getting Started is about getting started with a website for your business.