Seminar 1: November 7th 2006
Thanks to all who came to our first seminar on 7th November 2006, which was very well attended.You can find the powerpoint slides here (please note that these are not for distribution and remain copyright of the Oxford Web Group):
The Q+A session transcript follows:
A: The ability to convert site visitors to inquiries and inquiries to customers will depend on the products, services or types of information offered by an organisation. For example, an e-shop (e-commerce site) selling a broad range of ‘casual clothing’ may need a high volume of traffic in order to achieve its sales targets because is offering is unfocused. The reason for this is that visitors may be less qualified than if they were seeking a particular brand of clothing, or may just be researching what products are available. If a site is focused on a specific brand of outdoor clothing, the conversion rate may be higher, because such a site would be targeting people that are actively looking to buy a particular brand of outdoor clothing.
A: In order not to confuse search engines about which address your site is hosted under, you should choose a primary web address for all online promotions. Because many search engines cannot distinguish between words if they not separated by a hyphen, you should host and promote your site with the hyphenated version. For example a company called the “Green Tea Company” would choose as it web address www.green-tea-company.co.uk. It may want to purchase other domain names, such as www.greenteaisgoodforyou.co.uk, but these should only be used in offline campaigns (i.e. email marketing or printed literature). The other domains should also be set up as basic re-directs to the primary hoisting address, and should not be use in any online promotional activity, such as online PR or link building. Underscores are not recognised by some search engines as space delimiters, and so should not be used to separate out the words in a domain name or URL.
A: Hyphens are the best forms of universally recognised space de-limiter. A space and full stop are other delimiter characters – but you would not necessarily want to use these as part of your site’s URLs.
A: Micro sites are not bad as such – it is doorway pages that can cause real problems. A doorway page is usually a page engineered to show one set of content and keywords to a search engines, and then a different set of content to a user. This type of ‘spamming’ activity is explicitly banned by many search engines. A micro-site or campaign landing page is a perfectly acceptable marketing tool, as long as there is no ambiguity as to its purpose. Micro sites may not perform well in search engines, unless they have enough pages to be viewed by search engines as website in their own right. To properly optimise and promote a site in search engines, the minimum number of pages is going to be around ten.
A: If your collection of micro sites had enough pages each to be considered fully-fledged websites, then interlinking them would not be a bad idea, if they feature similar content. But there are two things to be avoided: one is to link to another site from every page of a site (a handful of links from one site to another are plenty) and the micro sites may features similar content – but not exactly the same content; you much avoid repetition or mirroring of content across multiple sites, and even on the same site, as it may be misconstrued as an attempt to spam search engines.
A: If a site has less than 10 pages it is difficult to optimise and promote. Creating a news resource or portion of a site that can be expanded easily is a good idea to help increase the number of pages on a site.
A: It depends on how the links are exchanged and with whom. It also depends on how many links you have on a single page of your site, and how many pages features links to external sites. If you are exchanging links with you business partners, suppliers and customers, then this will be a valid activity. If you are exchanging links with other websites (such as through a useful links resource) then you should ensure that you do not feature too many of these links on a single page, and that the sites you are linking to have some relevance to the business you are in (i.e. the site needs to feature similar keyword phrases to the ones on your site).
There are many different available packages including Corel - Paint Shop Pro, Adobe - Photoshop Elements and Roxio - Photosuite to name but a few. Google offers "picasa" - which is more of a photo organiser. Choosing one is really a matter of budget and requirements, as most are user-friendly even to those unfamiliar with manipulating images for the web. The following site provides some reviews of the most popular packages: http://www.itreviews.co.uk/software/s334a.htm
www.opensourcecms.com is a useful site. As far as adding or expanding functions is concerned, most CMS offer different ways of achieving this. Before deciding, make sure you understand all the options, especially on the admin interface – this is where most of your work will take place. A good content management system will take the form of a web application as this can be accessed from anywhere. Make sure the solution knows how to handle a number of content types, e.g. news, and that all the pages produced are Search Engine friendly. To be search engine friendly, a page requires correctly coded title, description and keyword Meta tags. In addition to this, ensure the content hierarchy is well managed, that it gives you a degree of control over formatting and font styles, such as h1 and h2 tags, bold, and bullet text and so on.
Every user has a different monitor, and will have different settings on their browser or monitor, so regardless of how you design a page and its colours it may appear differently to someone viewing it elsewhere.
Web forums are particularly popular with membership organisations. Forums can be a quick and easy way for people to submit their thoughts on any ideas they've had or problems they've encountered, and allows a medium for the organisation to pick up on these. However, be warned! With this ease of submission comes the danger of spam. Forums (which are free to submit to) often become easy targets for spammers. Editing submissions to filter out spam can be a huge waste of time and a drain on resources. To avoid this, it is always possible to provide a simple sign-up mechanism for subscribers to avoid the majority of spam submissions. Conversely, a large percentage of forums on websites have no contributions, and these instead just take up valuable space on a site – with little return on time and investment. Don't let this put you off - forums can be very valuable if they work, but it is important to have steady traffic to a site first.
By far the easiest way of having a membership of sorts is to provide a free newsletter to which people can sign up. What the content is, of course, will be industry specific, but if people are interested in its content, then providing a link to your site is a good way of getting people there. Having a members-only area is a possibility, but bear in mind the fact that the fewer barriers people encounter, the more likely they are to get involved with the products, services or information of a site.
Each email service has a different way of identifying what is and what isn't junk, but there are a few important things to remember. Avoid embedded images. Many email browsers strip embedded images anyway, and some will automatically classify emails with embedded images as junk. Go easy on content - be concise. Readers' time is precious, and many will be put off by lengthy prose, rather than something which is short and to the point. The main content of the newsletter should be on your site in any case, and the email providers a pointer to it. Clearly provide a link to your site in the email which people can click on. Always provide an opt-out mechanism, a simple way for a user to unsubscribe to the newsletter. This is necessary to ensure that your email is officially not classed as spam.
Yes, most basic hosting providers will allow you to install content management applications on their servers.
Never host your site actually in your office or on your computer – it is difficult to guarantee your site will be continually accessible or "live". Clearly you and your staff need to go home and sleep, so there is no way of monitoring that hardware is still up and running at all times of the of day or night. A hosting provider should be able to do this, and achieve as close to 100% uptime as is possible. A viable way of making sure your site is constantly live is to use a well known hosting provider for as little as £50 per year.
The only time this would ever be a problem, is if a host has been "blacklisted".
There is an easy way to avoid this, again by using a larger, better known company for your hosting, which is much less likely to be blacklisted than less well known providers.
A keyword phrase will generally consist of two or three words. Trying to optimise your site on single words will generally be a waste of time, because either they will be too ;’generic’ to attract potential customers to your site, or more realistically you will not stand a chance of ranking on such words as they are too competitive. If you are optimising a page on a single keyword phrase, then it should not exceed 10-15% of the total content on that page. If a phrase appears more frequently that this, it may appear to a search engine that you are deliberately trying to spam it. Having said that, it is important that keywords are properly coded in the Meta tags of the site, as well as contained within h1 tags (the most prominent header of a site) and possible in bold text, bulleted text and in alt text ('alternative text' - the text that appears when a cursor hovers over an image, intended for 'text-only' browsers, which are used by people with visual impairments for example). All these factors give more weight to keywords on a given page in search engines.
