Simply creating a website and putting it online won't result in droves of visitors looking at your site. You need a site that's visually appealing (hire a professional graphic designer), has all the features and pages you need (get a good web developer for this) and ticks all the boxes when it comes to being search engine friendly.

Many websites today are built quickly and cheaply, and often at the expense of proper attention to basics of on-page SEO.

Google have released an updated version of their excellent SEO Starter Guide, available for free right now.

The guide gives any willing reader a good overview of the SEO process, and helps identify where assistance may be required to take things further - especially in competitive markets. Readers should realise that SEO is not black magic - it just takes time, effort and experience.

If you're looking for help with Search Engine Optimisation for your website, get in touch today to see how we can help!

SEO comes down to 3 main areas of work: Research, On-site optimisation and Off-site activity.

Research

Research involves a number of things, but mainly it's all about figuring out what your target customers are typing in to the search engines, and how many. We can all take educated guesses when it comes to this, but it's just that - a guess. Research will identify the searches your customers are ACTUALLY performing, and how many searches are performed each month for those 'keywords'. You need those keywords on your website (in the right places) to even stand a chance of getting the traffic you need. Which brings us to On-site optimisation.

On-site optimisation

On-site optimisation relates to work done on the target website. You need to have the website evaluated and get mistakes corrected (unfortunately all-to-common), and add things that will help Search Engines understand your website more effectively. It's all about making your website 'Search Engine Friendly'. Since any of your competitors can achieve the same level of on-site optimisation as you without too much difficulty, search engines have to consider other factors when it comes to ranking results...

Off-site activity

This leads us on to Off-site activity. Once you have a 'Search Engine Friendly' website up and running, and you've got the right keywords on there in the right places, you might find you still don't rank highly. This is because your competitors will likely have more links from other websites pointing to theirs. Links count as votes. But not every link is equal in weighting, which is why it's time consuming to find websites worth getting links from, and then actually getting those links in place. We have multiple strategies you can use to acquire these links, and you can get us to do it all for you.

This is a very brief overview - a nutshell sized one. The results you get with an SEO agency all revolve around your budget and ranking difficulty (it'll be harder to rank high for a search term in which you have competition from others, who are also running SEO campaigns). And with so many shady SEO agencies around, you'll need to select one with due care and attention!

For a more depth discussion of Search Engine Optimisation, check out our articles How to increase traffic to your website AND convert visits to sales and Understanding the basics of Search Engine Optimisation.

Is your website going unnoticed? Get in touch today and we'll help you get started with SEO.

After several rounds of designs and tweaks to those designs, the brand new Practice on the Green website has been launched today. Sporting a treatments section, photo gallery, team page and contact forms, this fully Content Managed site can be maintained and updated instantly by staff easily, and with no technical qualifications necessary.

The new site acts as a valuable digital communication tool for Practice on the Green, providing a wealth of information for existing and prospective customers alike, and reinforcing the family and service orientated brand values of the practice.

With further collaboration between Hallway Studios and Practice on the Green already slated for delivery in the coming weeks, be sure to watch this space!

Why not visit the new Bushey dentists website and let us know what you think?

Do you need help with your digital strategy? Contact us today and see what we can do for your business.

So it's that mushy loved up time of year again. Valentine's Day - loved by some, hated by others, is here today whether you like it or not.

If you ever wondered how us web-wizard folk celebrate Valentine's - then wonder no more.

Here's a special message our very own Director here at Hallway Studios put together for a special someone:

http://www.binarymonkey.co.uk/story/

(Yes, it's HTML 5! And CSS 3! And a bit romantic - sorry...)

Yes, December 2010 is upon us already. We all think that by went pretty quickly, but we've had some great projects through the doors here at Hallway HQ, not to mention other company landmarks for us.

Moving to our shiny new office in Leighton Buzzard has proven to be a great decision and we're absolutely thrilled with the new workspace and local coverage it affords us, as well as still maintaining an auxillary office in Watford.

We've also invested time in an updated logo and brand identity for Hallway Studios that we've rolled out across the board - with a brand new website update due in February 2011. More about this when the time comes.

Being the festive season, our creatives couldn't resist cooking up a little something for the office - festive gingerbread men!

Tasty!

Best wishes from everyone at Hallway Studios, we do hope you enjoy the holiday and spend lots of quality time with friends and family!

Keeping things organised and streamlined takes good staff, tools and processes.

Purity Productions identified an opportunity to improve their process used for their venue finding service, and asked Hallway Studios to come up with a proposal to fit the bill.

We delivered the goods in the form of a custom built web based portal that now enables Purity to manage their constantly growing and carefully selected database of venues, along with precision search facilities, client project management and e-mail dispatch of venue shortlists neatly bound within automatically generated PDF files.

The multi-user system has resulted in improved efficiency, consistency and an overall better experience for Purity's clients.

Here's what Rob Quinn, Managing Director of Purity Productions had to say about the work:

"Matthew has recently completed a project for us to develop a bespoke system streamlining the Purity Productions venue finding service. His approach is consultative and considerate and took our business needs into account across the board. He continues to provide support and makes himself readily available to the Purity Productions team when required. We are now looking to future projects that will involve Matthew and on this basis wouldn't hesitate to recommend him."

Do you want talk to us about your own custom web system or software? Send us an e-mail or call us on 0800 0744 990 today!

Whether you already have a free website, or if you're thinking about getting one, we've compiled a list of common pitfalls that you might like to be aware of (something you won't see with a quality web design service):

Hidden fees

Most 'free' web site companies will sting unsuspecting customers with fees for additional services that will be required for a fully working site. This could be web hosting, domain names, extra bandwidth (the amount of visitors that can visit your site) or even a fee to remove excessive advertising. In most cases, these fees will be several times higher than the going rates!

Very long domain name

A common tactic free site vendors use is to allow their customers to choose a 'free' domain - although this usually ends up being a sub-domain of a top-level domain, e.g. www.yourbusiness.123freewebsitesrus.com - rather lengthy and difficult to remember! To use your own proper domain, companies may charge an inflated premium compared to other more professional companies.

Advertisements

To cover the cost of free sites, advertising can be placed on the site to claw back cash needed for operating costs. This obviously cheapens your brand, and the advertising may be quite excessive, and may not be removable - unless you want to pay for the privilege!

Non-unique 'template' design

The design / look of the site will most likely be used several thousand times over for other sites, instead of being unique to your company. Companies offering free 'template' sites save by only designing a very small set of templates that are re-used many times over. Is your business unique, or just like everything else out there?

No attention to detail

Companies offering free sites will not spend time getting those little details just right - because they aren't getting paid to do so! This will be quickly noticed by your visitors, which won't exactly do wonders for your company image. People like to do business with companies that take pride in their attention to detail.

Hosting problems

Any web site requires a computer server constantly on in order to send pages from your web site in response to a visitor's requests. To save on hosting fees, free web sites are often hosted on low quality, unreliable servers - usually sharing with thousands of other sites on a single server. Sites will be slow to load, and with free hosting companies frequently going bankrupt, the site could just vanish!

Hallway Studios is an experienced web design company that can offer a complete, transparent and genuine service for your business. Read more about our web design service.

OK, you want the hard facts? Here's a handy list of reasons why any business should seriously consider being online in some form:

(Pssst! Check out our web design page!)

Your website will be open for business 24/7

Unlike your office or store which may only be open during the usual working hours, a website is always available at any time of day, all year round, from anywhere in the World. If you are selling online, the benefits are huge.

Customers will find your business through search engines

Many people decide which company they want to use based purely on the information available on that company's website, found through Internet search engines. If you don't have a website, you won't get found, and you'll be missing out on potential business.

Your company will appear more professional

As more and more businesses deploy websites, customers have come to expect professional businesses to have a website - If you don't, it can look unprofessional.

Simple queries will be reduced

By providing a list of frequently asked questions and other information on your website, customers can find answers to common queries - reducing the number of simple enquiries received.

Recruitment opportunities can be advertised

Customers aren't the only people who know how to use a search engine! Advertising on your website for job positions gives you another way to reach prospective employees (in addition to your existing advertising, or even as a complete replacement).

Extra marketing opportunities

You can collect all sorts of information from visitors to your website, and then use this information to build a marketing database filled with contact details. For example, you might provide a newsletter that requires the subscriber to provide a working e-mail address. Maybe you'd like some special forms that provide customised quotes based on the users input?

Free market research

It's easy to see detailed information on who is visiting your website and what they are doing once on it - you'll get to know your target market very well indeed! You may be surprised to learn what your most popular pages turn out to be...

Use as a virtual business card for networking

When networking with other professionals in business, it's invaluable to e-mail them your website. You could even set up a page dedicated to introducing your business to new contacts - so you won't have to repeat yourself! Your website address can be put in your e-mail signature, on printed business cards, etc...

» Interested in getting a web site? Check out our web design services, or call us today!

Mobile is big, and getting bigger. Apple sold 1.7 million iPhone 4s within 3 days of it going to market. Android (the software on many HTC, Samsung and Motorola phones) is activating a staggering 160,000 devices per day, and growing.

People aren't just using these smart phones to make the odd phone call or text message - they're using them to browse the Internet. It's a fast growing market, and smart businesses are sitting up and taking notice.

The problem

Internet speeds are much slower on mobile devices

Many web sites today have been designed for desktop computers, happily sucking down the Internet through nippy broadband connections.

That means web designers can afford to use nice big images and large Javascript libraries to enhance web sites. With broadband, downloading these big files isn't a problem - but when you're on a mobile phone with limited speed and a restrictive monthly data allowance, fancy websites designed for the desktop computer suddenly stop translating into a great experience for mobile users.

Some technologies aren't available on smart phones

Case in point: The iPhone, iPad and iTouch devices do not, and never will, support Adobe Flash. Flash is a web browser plug-in that enables web designers to create animated sequences and flashy effects on web sites. Okay, so some of these sites might have an alternate page for non-Flash visitors, but this is often a poorly executed afterthought.

Does your web site rely heavily on Flash? If it does, you're shutting out your mobile visitors. Goodbye potential sales leads.

Mobile screen sizes are far smaller than your nice 24" desktop monitor

Rather unavoidably, mobile phone screen sizes are tiny. So browsing web sites on smart phones involves a lot of zooming in and out, panning about and general shuffling around in all directions. And that Apple Vulcan-death-grip thing? Yeah, the shine wears off after a while.

Giving your users a web site designed for gigantic 24" monitors might seem like a great idea, but are you forgetting your your mobile visitors with their limited screen real estate? Zooming in and out and scrolling in all directions is annoying, and if you're making browsing your web site too much like hard work for your mobile visitors, then you can hardly expect them to engage with your company.

If it ain't broke...

Of course, you probably don't need to worry about fixing up your web site to please the mobile masses if they aren't actually visiting your site. So you're going to need some intelligence about what people are using to view your web site.

To check this out, you'll need access to your web site statistics. If you haven't the foggiest what this is, or you don't check your statistics, you have bigger problems on your hands. The good news is that it's very easy to add this tracking.

We use a fantastic website statistics package on web sites we design, called Google Analytics. It's free, fairly easy to use and provides a fantastic amount of information. If you don't have this, check with your web developer. It shouldn't take more than 15 minutes to set up.

Google Analytics - Visitors Overview

To check the total visitors accessing your web site using a mobile device, do the following in Google Analytics:

1. Click 'Visitors' on the left
2. Click 'Mobile' in the list that appears under Visitors
3. Click 'Mobile Devices'
4. Check the right hand results table - you're looking for 'Visits'

Once you have this screen called up, you can then easily see the number of mobile visits in the time period selected (the last 30 days by default), and what percentage this is of your total visits. You'll also be able to see the top mobile devices in the list below that figure. See the screen shot below:

Google Analytics - Mobile Devices

Making your mobile visitors happy

Let's take an example from a little web store called Amazon. Below are a couple of screen shots comparing how they adapt their web site to display differently when accessed through a mobile phone.

Amazon.co.uk - Accessed using a desktop computer

Amazon.co.uk - Accessed using a mobile phone

As you can see, Amazon are clearly providing a different web site interface for mobile users. This makes it much easier for their customers using smart phones to browse their store and make purchases online.

If you have a reasonable number of users accessing your web site using a mobile device, then this is the best way to cater for that audience effectively.

Step 1: Identify the traffic you need to get results

And when I say traffic, I don't mean any old traffic.

I mean relevant traffic from people interested in your offering, that are ready to buy, enquire or take a desirable action.

If your website sells places on training courses, then you'll be needing traffic from people looking for training courses. You aren't interested in visits from people looking to buy a car. Sure, those car-buyers might generate traffic to your website, but they aren't useful to you because you don't sell courses with 3.0-litre turbo engines in British racing green.

Getting 2,000 visits a month to your website? Not getting the results you want? It's pretty likely the traffic is irrelevant. You need to draw in traffic from visitors interested in your product or service.

50 relevant visits is far more valuable to you than 2,000 irrelevant visits.

Search Term Research

When you promote your website in the Search Engines, everything is based around search terms (or keywords). It's what your potential customer pipes into Google, Yahoo or Bing just before they get a list of results they'll be able to visit.

Before you promote your web page(s) in Search Engines, you need to know what to search terms you should be targetting. This means finding out what your potential customers are physically searching for, and how many searches were completed for those terms recently.

You then need to pick out the terms which are most suited to your needs:

• Highly related to your products or services
• Not too broad (one/two word searches are far too broad and won't result in a high conversion rate)
• Reasonable search volume (a #1 position will afford you with roughly 45% of the total searches clicking through)
• Competition (who is ranking highly for that search term? how strong is their position? can you compete?)

As you can see, there's a lot to consider! The task is made slightly easier by using some tools that help with collating data you need, such as Google Keyword Tool, Yahoo! Site Explorer or WordTracker to name but a few.

Just like any market research, you'll need to review this research on a regular basis to make sure you're still targetting an active market.

Step 2: Increase qualified, relevant traffic to your site

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Campaign

Once you've identified the search terms you need to optimise for, these terms need to be placed in all the right parts of your web site code and content so that the search engines can see your pages are relevant for these terms. Since this is all done on your web site, it's called 'on-site optimisation'.

You'll need your researched search terms in your:

• Meta Title
• Meta Description
• H1 tag
• Paragraph tags
• Image 'ALT' attributes
• Page URL / web address
• Link text on your own internal site links

All Greek to you? Hire a good web development company to get this done for you.

Since your competition can get up to the same level of 'on-site' optimisation, the other major ranking factor is the number of targeted, relevant, quality links pointing to your pages (and not just the home page).

Links essentially count as votes for your page(s), pushing up your ranking position for your targeted search phrases. So fairly obviously, you'd need to build links from other web sites to your pages to attain high rankings.

Pros:

• You don't have to pay per click
• Rankings are long lasting (so long as you have more/better links than your competition)
• Bigger market share (more people click on 'natural' results than on adverts)

Cons:

• Getting links from other web pages can be difficult and time consuming
• Search Engines take time to reflect ranking changes
• Editing web page code can get complicated

Many companies hire agencies to manage this process and build the right types of links for them.

Pay-per-click Marketing (PPC)

It's still important to target the right search terms in PPC, as you don't want your advert showing up unless it's highly related to the search that a user has just performed. So you'll still need to do search term research to figure out effective terms to target.

So once you have your search terms sorted, it's a case of creating ads that work - each ad should be:

• Unique (differentiate your ad from the competition)
• Well written (consider hiring a copywriter to write compelling ads)
• Eye-catching (words in your ad matching the search term are emboldened)
• Highly related to the search term your potential customer has performed

Getting click-throughs on your ads from interested users is only half the battle. You still need to convert those clicks into enquiries. To do this, your landing pages (the page shown after clicking on an advert) MUST be specifically written for the advert that was clicked on. This usually means producing dedicated landing pages for each advert you run to maximise conversion rates.

For example, let's say your advert is shown when a search is performed for 'paediatric first aid training course'. Your ad might mention a £10 discount. When the user clicks on the ad, the page they end up on needs to be specifically about that paediatric training course, clearly showing the benefits, venue, price with discount and a big 'book now' button.

If you simply send them to your home page, the chances they'll convert into a sale are slim.

Pros:

• Near-instant results (ads can be shown immediately)
• Rankings are long lasting (so long as you have more/better links than your competition)
• Show your ads to users in a specific geographic location, down to city level

Cons:

• You have to pay for every click, regardless whether or not you make a sale/conversion
• Turn off the money and you instantly switch off your traffic
• Less people click on PPC ads than on natural/organic search results

Press Releases / PR

Online or offline, getting your name and website address in the press is going to bring you traffic. If you can put a spin on your products or services, then consider writing press releases for PR web sites, or local newspapers and magazines. Often looking for content, this type of promotion ends up working out for everyone.

• Come up with an interesting story or article that involves your company, products or services in some way
• Identify related PR web sites and submit articles to them
• Contact local press with your articles and get them published

If you're getting articles published online, make sure you get a link to your web page included.

Blogging

Creating content that your potential customers are interested in and want to read is a no-brainer. A blog will enable you to create and publish articles on your web site which can then be found in search engines.

• Don't write sales pitches
• Don't copy content from other sites
• Write useful, unique and relevant content
• Make sure your blog is on your web site and not hosted elsewhere (e.g. Blogger or Wordpress.com)
• Ensure you have a way for readers to share the page with their friends (i.e on Facebook, Twitter or by E-mail)
• Include an RSS feed so your readers can get updates automatically on your blog

Bonus side effect: Writing good articles will encourage other users to link to your web site - improving your Search Engine ranking!

To make the best use of a blog, you need to look at writing at least 2 articles per month - but the more the better. Each article you create will increase your 'surface area' in search engines and therefore leads to increased traffic potential with each post.

E-Mail Newsletters

Sometimes you'll get visitors to your website that are interested in your products or services but aren't quite ready to buy yet. But that doesn't mean they aren't going to buy from you in future!

• Set up a form where your visitors can subscribe to your mailing list
• Make sure you sell your mailing list's benefits (e.g. free tips, special offers and lots of useful info)
• Ensure the sign up form is easily visible and prominent on your key pages
• Have new subscribers automatically added to a professional e-mail campaign management system
• Send e-mail to your mailing list no more than once a month (more than that and you'll see people unsubscribing)
• Don't send unsolicited e-mail!

Step 3: Convert traffic / visits to sales or enquiries

Once your potential customer is on your page, you need to do your very best to ensure they take the action you want them to take, be that a purchase, enquiry or download of a brochure.

• Your web site should be professionally presented and come across as a credible business
• The text on your pages should be clear, concise and contain lots of calls-to-action (e.g. 'Buy yellow widgets now') - we suggest hiring a good copywriter
• Lay out objects on your pages in places where users are proven to look
• Make sure your web site is VERY easy to navigate
• Pick a fast web hosting company to ensure your pages load quickly without delay
• Try out different versions of your pages to see which perform better (A/B testing)