Isle of Man Website Design & SEO

We all need links. If there is one thing that will see your website shoot up the search rankings for you keywords it’s plenty of well targeted links point at your website. The trouble is trying to find these links. There are 2 complications time and expense. The easiest links to find ALWAYS cost much more than the more difficult links.

One source of links is the various link directories out there. Whilst I would never suggest relying on them entirely they can be a valid part of your linking program. The rouble is that these links take time. Lots of time. In managing the link building for many clients I have been lucky enough to form business relationships with several companies that can help lessen that time burden. The one I’d like to recommend to you is Online Internet Marketing Services. They are a company based in Phuket, Thailand that can really help with your directory submissions. They offer multiple packages for manual submission (this is hugely important) to a great number of both high and low quality directories all for very affordable prices.

I’s strongly recommend you check them out.

Having a website design company design you a custom content management system is becoming quite the thing to do these days. Whilst the initial costs are much higher than that of a static website many small companies prefer to have the option of updating and creating new content at will, both major advantages of using a CMS over traditional static website development. The problem is though are you getting value for money, with even an average bespoke system costing upwards of £6000 it’s very important that your website performs. A lot of website designers and PHP programmers aren’t even aware of the impact a badly designed (in terms of SEO) content management system can have on their clients potential rankings. As you’re the customer it’s up to you to make yourself aware of the pit-falls and how to avoid a “bad” CMS.

3 SEO Checks To Make On Your Custom CMS

1. Search Friendly URLs - Most CMSs work by querying a database with a set of parameters and populating a templated page depending on that query. As a result the URL you see in the navigation bar will often look similar to http://www.yourwebsite.com/dopage.php?page=my-tools&show=all&makenice=true Search engines do not like long query strings and are quite partial to just knocking them off. You could end up severely limiting what pages get indexed by the search engines. A smaller list of indexed pages more likely will result in less “free” organic search traffic. The easiest way of fixing this problem is to have your web design company use the URL re-write rules that come with using a Linux/Apache platform to create search friendly URLs. For the example, the above could end up looking like http://www.yourwebsite.com/my-tools/all/makenice (just an example, in reality it wouldn’t be hard to make this http://www.yourwebsite.com/my-tools/) . No query string, nothing for the search engines to dislike. If you are going down the IIS and ASP/ASP.net route then there are workarounds, they are just a little bit more involved.

2. Duplicate Content - The search engines (well Google mainly) hate duplicate content, it’s in your interest to only ever feed them 1 copy (under 1 URL) of each unique page of your website. Luckily there is a ready made mechanism for making sure this happens, it’s called the robots.txt file. The file is read by the search spiders/robots and they use it to tell them what they can or can’t trawl from your website. When this matters with custom content management systems is that developers have a tendency to provide multiple paths to the same content (be it categories/ tag clouds or just a simple search function). Whilst this is great for visitors you have to make sure that the search engines only get 1 copy of your content.

3. Only Make Secure What Needs To Be Secure - When you are having your CMS written it’s always nice to have a secure area, maybe it’s for staff or registered users? The problem is that the search engines can’t spider anything that requires a login (99% use cookie authentication and the search robot can’t pass a cookie to authenticate itself). It’s very important then that when at the design stage that you make it clear that you want as much content as is possible in the open public part of your website. You’d be amazed what sort of content can draw organic search traffic, don’t limit yourself by hiding content away that doesn’t need securing.

In today’s current climate there are many ways to get yourself penalised by Google, link bombing is certainly one way so it’s going to be kinf of interesting to see how the big G deal with this SEO contest. The owners over at UKWebmasterForum have decided to run a contets for SEO’s to see who can rank the best for the search term SEOContest2008. Before the contest started there were only a handfull of results for that phrase in Google’s index whilst todays count shows about 3270 results. I can’t wait to see if the competitors end up getting a Google slap for this type of linking strategy, I guess the cleverer ones have set up temporary domains/blogs for this content just in case that happens.

Good Luck In The SEOContest2008

Anyway as much as I worry for the SEO contestants my main reason for writing this post was to wish one of my SEO friends all the very best in the competition. With any luck Astrit might win the SEOContent2008.

By the way if you’re interested you might want to do a search for SEOContest2008 now, the results you’ll find show how important having the search phrase in your domain name is.

One of the most frustrating things about trying to gain extra search traffic for your website is chasing those often elusive long tail search phrases. By long tail I mean for example people searching for “white 2005 ford focus 4 door” instead of “ford focus”. Long tail keywords can be the key to upping your conversion rate, the big problem with this is trying to guess what potential browsers may be searching for.

Thanks to a new tool called SEO Digger some extra help is at hand. You see even if you don’t intentionally target some of these longer phrases people may still be using them to find your website. Without any effort you might find yourself in position 15,18.20 for these certain phrases that drive traffic, the SEO Digger will help you expose those phrases so that you can meaningfully target them. It might be something as simple as adding one or 2 more mentions of a phrase to your page, it might be best if you create a whole new page around the long tail phrase. Either way SEO Digger is a fantastic tool for showing what phrases your pages are already appearing “somewhere” for.

What about your competition? That’s another great thing about this tool, it allows you to find out what phrases your competition are ranking in the top 20 for on both Google and MSN. Whilst there may be phrases you can’t overtake them for there may be other longer, hidden searches that return a better conversion rate that are ripe for the picking.

So in short the SEO Digger is a tool that will show what search phrases in Google and MSN a web page ranks in the top 20 for. For each phrase it will also tell you its popularity in WordTracker and Overture.

I’ve been running my little experiment for over 6 weeks now. Due to quite a large change in direction for the company I thought it might be interesting to see of putting adverts on my pages would damage the amount of business the website generated.

The truth is that for my business the adverts made no difference! The amount of enquiries was down a fraction (but then it’s up and down every month anyway) but the amount of business generated as a percentage was about the same as the previous month. To be fair the adverts I used were very much in-line so not very obtrusive but even so they generated enough income to pay for the website hosting and a few small marketing plans.

I’m going to carry on again this month with some slightly more exposed adverts and see what happens, I’ll report back in a months time.

What domain name should you use? Well there are 2 schools of thought about this.

1. Use your business name
2. Use a product/service related name

The first of these is obvious, if you company is called John’s Cars then look for johnscars.com, johns-cars.com etc etc Are you a well known brand? If not then this could be a very bad idea. I’ve seen plenty of local companies go down this route, of course the only way anybody ever finds their website is if it’s told to them via some other means e.g. in person, via the radio, newspaper ads. Sort of defeats the point of paying for a website doesn’t it if you then have to pay to get people to even find the thing?

The second approach is to use product or service related keywords. John’s Cars is an Isle of Man based second hand car dealership. Something like iomcarsales.co.uk or carsforsale.com are going to give him a huge boost (depending on search engine) in terms of search ranking. His website can then work to attract new customers instead of just being somewhere for all his other paid adverts to point to.

As you might guess I prefer the second option, however the next question is “But doesn’t that domain look dodgy, what about my business cards etc?” The beauty of this approach is that there is no reason not to use both. Domain names are cheap, if your business can’t afford another $7.95 a year for a domain name then your website should be the least of your troubles. I’d advise that you go for the second approach for your physically hosted website, and then use the first to host your e-mail. That way you can be contacted by e-mailing johnscars.com, can have johnscars.com on your business cards as your web address but you get the search benefits of being called iomcarsales.co.uk The only thing needed to make this happen is a simple 301 permanent redirection from the johnscars.com domain to iomcarsales.co.uk

But how important is the domain name?
Without mentioning any names, I know of 2 companies that operate in the same area, trying to attract the same clients. One went company name, the other went service related. With equal amounts of SEO in place, 1 had filled their books within 2 months, the other was struggling to get one enquiry a month. Obviously one had better search rankings, not only that but a major part of what Google shows you in the search results is the domain name. A lot of people clicked through the one which had the serice they were looking for in the domain name.

This is something I’ve often asked myself and figured it’s finally time to try a little experiment. By monetising I mean displaying ads on your website, these could possibly be from competing companies. The thing here is that it may also help out your visitor who is maybe looking for a related service or product that you don’t offer, it can also be a great way of covering hosting costs and even generating another revenue stream. The web is full of stories of people who now make more money in selling adverts on their webpage’s than selling the products the webpage’s were originally setup to promote. What I couldn’t find an answer to is does showing these adverts affect the amount of business your website generates?

To find this out I’m going to show some content related adverts on the Search Visible website and see how much income it generates and also how it effects enquiries. Look out in a months time for my findings! (Now might be a good time to subscribe to the RSS feed).

Running a small business on the Isle of Man can be an expensive thing to attempt. You see thanks to the extortionate cost of many essential services your overheads can be much bigger than you’d expect. The same was true for me when I started this, one of the biggest costs was for broadband. I wasn’t expecting Manx Telecom to charge so much more to business customers for what is essentially the same service as what their domestic customers get. Thankfully in recent times competition has emerged and that’s exactly what I planned to take full advantage off.

I did manage to source a MUCH cheaper basic business ADSL service through WiManx. A fairly new company on the Isle of Man but one which it appears will do very well (I recommend them to everybody now). Customer service and support was great and I was up and running in no time. However a problem soon came to light, my original Manx Net e-mail address. I’d used it as a business contact address when I first started out and although my contact details had been changed for a while the odd person would still contact me by it. The problem is that Manx Telecom only allows POP access to their e-mail accounts if you’re with them as an ISP. It’s probably one of the stupidest, most paranoid business decisions I’ve seen. To make things even worse their web mail interface is crap enough to almost be unusable. I had a problem, but what can you do?

I write e-mail forwarding software as a living so that got me thinking, if there was no POP access maybe there was a forwarding option hiding away somewhere in the webmail interface. Eventually I found it, it’s a great solution to this stupid problem and if anybody else is with another ISP but still wants access to their Manx Net Email then this is how I’d suggest you do it:-

• Sign into your Manx Net Email Account
• Click “Options” (top right hand side)
• In the left hand menu select the bottom option “Message Filters”
• Use the “New” option (top left)
• Create a new filter where the “From:” contains a “@”
• Set a “Forward To” action and put in the address that you want your Manx Net mail delivered to
• Save it. Once saved use the up arrow to position your new rule above the default spam rule

That’s you done, from now on any new messages that arrive in your Manx Net mailbox will automatically be forwarded to whatever address you specified, no more having to use that nasty web interface. Just one other note, and that’s that the original messages are not kept in Manx Net so make sure that the forwarding address you specify is valid.