http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/2290368/Passion

Here are the top 5 ways you can generally improve your website so that it does not lag behind in the competitive online market:

1 Accessibility:

A website should be accessible to both search engine spiders as well as online visitors. To make sure everything goes well, go for a reliable web hosting service. If your site is down due to some reasons or is exceptionally slow then it becomes difficult for the search engines bots to properly index the web pages. Your website should have a robots.txt file where your developers can put instructions for search engine spiders to crawl your site’s pages. You can also prevent the bots to crawl or index certain pages or certain portion of web page content by placing “disallow” commands for certain files and directories. If you are using frames, flash or lots of graphics for certain web pages make sure you provide options so that bots can enter those pages and crawl the page content.

2 Navigation:

Maintaining proper navigation for your site is extremely important for both your site visitors and search engine bots. Proper navigation aids a visitor to properly maneuver through its pages. Usually at the bottom of the web pages text links to other pages of the site are provided. If it is not possible to include links of all other pages on every web pages at least place them on the important pages.

3 SEO Friendliness:

Designing your website to be search engine friendly is essential. Maintaining search engine friendliness means you are providing necessary information to the search engine bots that view (crawl) your site to index your pages and give it a ranking. It is necessary to optimise your site pages for the search engines. Adding proper meta tags and ALT tags in web pages is also important. Proper keyword density needs to be maintained in the textual content of the web pages.

4 Linking:

When you launch your site on the web, the first and foremost thing is adopting all the necessary strategies that will make the search engine bots know where your site is. For this you need to start building links for your site. This will not only help search engine bots locate your sites, it will also bring page traffic – especially if the inbound links are in context to the content of your site. For improving link popularity of your site, you can submit the URL (eg. www.url.co.nz) to different web directories, exchange links with other relevant sites, write articles for other popular sites, send out press releases etc. By writing articles or maintaining your own blog you can also popularise your site which will generate a good volume of traffic over time.

5 Sitemap:

If you still have not created a sitemap for your website then it is necessary to do so to further improve your site. A sitemap helps search engine bots to find all the web pages on your site with ease instead of following the embedded links provided on the site pages. You can also provide short description about each page while listing them on the sitemap. This helps the potential visitor form an idea regarding page content and what they might expect when they click through to the page. To facilitate the search engine bots to find and index your web pages, you can submit a sitemap to the search engines directly and this service is free of cost.

Summary:

All our sites are built pre-configured for Search Engines from the moment they go live. Because we are so focused to outcomes, and measuring results a website produces for our clients, all of this information is vitally important in our build process. This ensures that not only is your website targeting the right customers, and being found by the right people, but that they are engaging with the site when they get there, and being converted to the appropriate course of action. Contact us using our online form if you’d like to find out more, or download our web requirements questionnaire and get a flavour of whats important when building your website.

1. Monitoring Your Web Presence:

As you maintain a web presence of your company or business, it is important for you to keep a track on it. You may be curious to know whether your business name is gaining popularity or your strategies are not properly working out. By monitoring your web presence you will be able to trace user’s feedback on your services/products. You will be also able to find out things like whether someone else is using the same business name or whether your work is being used elsewhere without your consent.

2. Social Media:

Social media is a great way to promote your site. Spreading the word about services or products to your target market online. There are numerous social networking sites where you can create your business profile and showcase your business to the other members on the network. Social media networking can increase the volume of quality traffic to your site.

3. Maintain Your Own Blog:

Across the world there is a huge readership for blogs. So maintaining a blog is not only trendy but also very beneficial from an online marketing point of view. You can use your blog for personal purpose as well as use it as one of the promotional tools for your main site. To ensure maximum impact, you can sign up with popular directories for registering your blog and can popularise it through your social network sites. You can also popularise your own service or site by commenting on blogs maintained by others where you will get links back to your own site.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

By applying SEO techniques, you can improve quality and the volume of web traffic to your site. Its a great way to boost the return of investment from a site. With the right SEO you can reach out to more targeted audiences and will ensure the right keywords are noticed by search engine bots.

5. Online Branding in a Consistent Way:

For success in Internet marketing, all your marketing communication tools should be aligned with your businesses brand. By doing this you will be able to spread you brand presence in a more effective and consistent way. You can also reach out to your consumers and spread your marketing message more prominently. Consistent use of online messages enhances the chance that the right group of targeted people will see your marketing offering.

6. Use of Electronic Press Releases:

You can enhance your media exposure with help of electronic press releases. By publishing industry related articles and press releases on the web that are related to your business, you will be able to reach out to more of your potential customers. It also helps in developing links to your site as you’re providing value to your target audience.

7. Email Marketing Campaigns:

Through email marketing you will be able to interact more easily with your customers. It’s important that this type of campaign is relevant to your customers. Email marketing campaigns can be used to spread key business information and recent or breaking news that is interesting to your target market.

8. Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing:

For initiating Pay Per Click marketing, you are required to analyse the traffic pattern of the target keywords and phrases for your website. You have to find out your best performing ads to generate a good amount of traffic to your site. With the help of PPC marketing, the advertiser receives payment as users click on a particular ad or banner.

9. Marketing on the Web:

There are a whole range of different free online tools, that can help you market your business better. Sites like Delicious, Flickr, Amazon.com, Slide Share, You Tube etc can be used for this purpose by leveraging the existing audience base to spread information about your products or services.

10. Be an Expert in Your Industry:

If you have expert knowledge in your field, then you can answer different queries posted by users on well respected websites relating to your industry. If users benefit from your solutions, they are likely to follow you and as a result web traffic and links to your site will increase, improving your SEO.

In summary:

Taking a strategic approach to your online offering, and targeting specific markets is literally the difference between the success and failure of your website. No traffic means no business leads which means a waste of time and effort on your part, and even worse the potential of damaging your brand by providing irrelevant information to your audiences. When it comes to web design and devlopment, we can help you make more money by having a considered approach with your website.

Get in touch with us today.

from www.migueltodaro.com/img_2/internet_timeline.jpg

What if web browsers were cars? We attempt to make the comparison…

In the last 15 years^[1] the internet has redefined the way we do just about everything in our lives. From socialising to business, there isn’t a single category that hasn’t been affected by the online domain. Most of us use the internet daily in our businesses whether it’s for product research, competitor analysis, communication, engaging with our customers or simply reading industry news. So if the internet is something that has become so important to us, what if we were missing out on a large chunk of it without even knowing? Almost like someone who has the wrong set of spectacles on (or needs specs but doesn’t know it); it’s only once your vision is corrected that you realise how poor the old experience was. This is what many of you may be experiencing by using an outdated web browser. But what is a web browser? If you don’t know you’re in good company – Google recently took a random survey of people asking what a web browser was, and fewer than 8% could answer the question correctly^[2].

So, in short: a web browser is the program on your computer you use to view websites.

Find out if your browser is good

If so little people know what a web browser is, it stands to reason that they probably aren’t aware that there are several web browser brands available, and that some are better than others at certain things. To take a quick test of how your browser rates with current internet technologies you can follow this link or click on the image below:

http://www.findmebyip.com/

Based on the number of ticks or crosses you can start to get an idea of how your browser stacks up.

Web browser brands

There are hundreds of web browsers to choose from, but there are only a few that are widely used and typically tested for when websites are built (Passionfruit tests its sites against all the major browsers). They are as follows:

Firefox - 46.6%
Internet explorer – 31%
Google Chrome – 15.9%
Safari – 3.6%
Opera – 2.1%

Percentages represent market share as at June 2010^[3]

If web browsers were cars

So hypothetically speaking, for the non-technophile, if browsers were cars they would probably be the following:

Firefox by Mozilla – Toyota Corolla – 8/10

Just like the Japanese did to the American car market after WW2, Firefox has been steadily eating away at Internet Explorers (IE) marketshare for years and has finally taken over the Microsoft giant. Firefox has become the dependable well known alternative to IE, and with it’s vast array of plugins has single handedly redefined what browsing the web is about. It is the dependable Toyota Corolla of browsers that is infinitely customisable and will suit the needs of 99% of all users. But the question is, does Mozilla as a Non-Profit Open Source Organisation have what it takes in the long run to compete with the likes of Google? Time will tell, but it will be the ultimate test of the open source model.

Download Firefox

Internet Explorer by Microsoft – Lincoln Town Car – 3/10

In the realm of computing, a lot of people love to hate Microsoft. But almost 10 years ago on August 27, 2001 when Internet Explorer 6 was released it was a very good browser with a whole raft of cutting edge technologies and improvements^[4]. It floored Netscape Navigator, which was up until then, the browser du jour. Unfortunately over time, IE has become convoluted and increasingly thumbed its nose at web standards and new technologies. IE is therefore likened to the Lincoln Town Car – as back in the day it may have been quite something, but it has become outdated, lumbering, ugly and cumbersome. It still lacks adherence to the latest web standards, and when compared with all the other browsers, fails miserably with modern web technologies^[5]. Unfortunately there’s no government bailout for the dinosaur that is IE6, and the newer versions of IE are overly complicated and (probably) an outcome of design by committee with every department manager getting their way.

Chrome by Google – Mitsubishi Evolution – 9/10

Chrome is a relative new comer to the web browser scene, but ever since its launch on 11 December 2008 it has made steady in-roads into the market. This is because it’s blindingly fast, is built on a framework called webkit which is arguably the best browser engine around (also used in Safari) and most importantly is built and supported by the largest force on the internet – Google. When they “imagineered”^[6] it, Google really went back to the fundamentals of what a browser was for, and what was important. So Chrome is like a Mitsubishi Evolution – it’s really fast, but is an every day driver that is comfortable and well designed. Even though it’s a race bred stallion of a car, you can happily pop down to the shops for some milk or pick up the kids from school, albeit in record time. It’s packed with technology to make you feel like a professional driver, even when you’re not. And it’s customisable with plugins and extensions, so if tints and Chrome plated wheels are your thing, you can go crazy.

Download Google Chrome

Safari by Apple – BMW 3 series – 7/10

Safari is the native browser that is packaged with Apple Computers, much like Internet Explorer is with Windows. It is a robust and standards compliant browser that is very well built, and secure. It’s easy to compare this to the BMW 3 series, because much like the BMW, Apple is very design focused and their products reflect this. This browser stacks up very well against the others although is limited as there are no plugins available to extend it.

Download Safari

Opera by Opera Software – Fiat 500 – 7/10

Finally there is Opera, a niche browser that has many passionately vocal advocates. It has a relatively small percentage of market share, but has consistently done so over the years. It really is the Fiat 500 of browsers – cute, niche, a little strange from a design perspective and definitely focused to Geeks with its inbuilt Bit-torrent capabilities. Just like the Fiat you tend to either love it or hate (but mostly love), and also it suits being tiny, as it’s probably one of the better solutions out there for mobile browsing of the web on cell phone operating systems.

Download Opera

In summary

The motivation for this article is because, as of today for the first time in 5 years I am seriously considering switching from Firefox to Chrome. I have always liked Chrome because of it’s speed and awesome bar (the bar that has predictive typing where the www.address.com goes). But until now I never realised that the recently launched extensions functionality for Chrome was so far ranging, and that 99% of the plugins I use for Firefox are now available for the Google Chrome browser. I still haven’t made the switch entirely, but I’m writing this article from the back-end of Passionfruit in Google Chrome so that says something.

Regardless of which browser you use, Passionfruit build all our sites so the experience is consistent across all the main browsers. Be wary of anyone who doesn’t build websites to W3C standard, as this can mean that your site may not display correctly in all browsers. You can test whether your site stacks up against W3C standards by using this validator (http://validator.w3.org/). If it doesn’t, give us a bell and we’ll be happy to fix it for you quick smart so you get more Google search listings, and happier users.

There’s a very simple way to know on a rough scale if your site is well built and functioning on the interwebs. Read on below to find out more.

After talking to a lot of business owners about their web requirements, and going through a back to basics questionnaire about why their business needs a website, its apparent there’s a general need around for businesses to find out whether or not their website is quality. One tool that I constantly use for getting a quick overview of how a site is placed is website grader. See the pic below:

It’s a relatively easy way to get a top down look across a number of primary internet channels about the quality of a site and it gives you a clear score out of 100. It’s really quite refreshing in our modern society to be graded in an old fashioned pass or fail way.

Although, the real measure of a site is LEADS. If your site is graded 3 out of 100 but generate several leads per day, then you probably don’t need to do much (although this scenario is unlikely). But if your site isn’t generating leads, or delivering key information to your specific target market, then there isn’t much point in it being on the web. So have a look at your site through the eyes of website grader, and if it’s not all that you thought it was cracked up to be, feel free to give us a call for some friendly plain English advice on what to do.