About Website Development and Marketing
My background includes developing internet, extranet and intranet sites whilst employed by blue chip companies such as Japanese manufacturer Brother Industries and roadside rescue service the RAC. I also have had many client facing roles and worked in marketing projects within these organisations as well as De La Rue and for the last seven years working for myself, running a variety of businesses from building an online business installing furniture to developing shopping carts and building a web development business.
This has given me a diverse range of qualifications and experience and an ability to quickly establish my clients needs.
I do most of the work I take on myself, although some of it is subcontracted where appropriate. For example I am not a graphic designer and outsource visual design, flash movies etc to ensure the highest quality can be maintained. I also outsource certain elements of promoting websites online or recommend third parties to use, again to ensure timely delivery and high quality. This is especially important since you do not want a business critical tool such as your website to be dependent on a single person.
Websites are used for a variety of purposes, some are just reference sites, other merely a brochure, but more often than not, they are necessary to tell the world what you do and help entice people to buy from you, ie drive sales.
Most websites should be built using a twist on the old retail cliché Location Location Location! which translates to Keywords Keywords Keywords! This is not always the case but I cannot stress how important it is you investigate your keywords before your start if you hope to push your site to the top of the search engine results for any given product or service. This is not always easy to do and it is time consuming. I offer this service and can undertake keyword research before you register your domain or even think what content you want on your website.
Top Keyword Tips:
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Choosing Effective Keywords
- Think outside the box, the obvious is not always the best.
- Focus on a product or service that sells well online (not always relevant but worth bearing in mind).
- Make sure Google returns less than 50,000 results for an exact match (search phrase in quotes) and no more than 2,000,000 for a broad match. Any more and there may be too much competition for you to easily make an impact.
- The Adwords cost per click for position number 1 is over 50p, this ensures that people are actively interested in and search for the product or service.
- Generally ensure that over 4,000 searches per calendar month are being made for your keyword phrase, otherwise it is pointless.
Designing and Writing the Copy
- use the main keywords in your domain name, this helps with ranking
- only focus on 1-3 keyword phrases per page to ensure the content can be easily optimised
- use keyword phrases of 2-4 words, these are more specific and ensure better quality and more naturally targeted traffic.
Competitor Analysis
- Three factors indicate how difficult it will be to get to number one and therefore whether the keyword is appropriate and can be pushed within your budget.
- The actual cost per click
- Page Rank of top 3 sites indicates how important Google considers each site.
- Number of links indicates how well promoted a site is.
Adword PPC Campaigns
Google is by far the most popular, but Overture is Microsoft's equivalent and can be worth exploring especially considering the immminent rise of Bing as it has merged with Yahoo and is the default search engine on all new PCs.
Facebook is worth a special mention, with the Facebook PPC campaign you can accurately target your potential customers. If you want to sell to pregnant mothers in Manchester, set up a PPC campaign and show your adverts to women, with 14 km of Manchester and when they view various pregnancy groups.
A simple return on investment (ROI) calculation should determine what price you can bid up to:
Typical Gross Profit on Sale - Cost of Sale = Net Profit
The total number of PPC Adverts required to achieve one sale are a significant cost and will dictate what price you may be prepared to bid and how much profit you make.
