How can your business maximise your opportunities on the Internet?
The main areas you need to consider here are:
- measuring your website
- search engine registration
- the right brand
- the right website
Whether or not you have brought in the experts to develop your site, you can still take advantage of these simple yet effective strategies for success.
Measuring Websites Results
Via your webhost (or ISP) you should get access to results on:
- traffic (the number of impressions/hits)
- number of new visitors . number of returning visitors
- your visitors’ domain names, not e-mail, (you want check to see if competitors are viewing your website)
- how they arrived at your site (via other websites” URL”s) such as www.training.net.au/directory or a search engine they used to find your site.
To put this into practical terms, Training.net.au’s recent reports identifi-ed 80% of our Australian visitors found us via search engines www.anzwers.com.au and only a handful from Yahoo’s website. Some typed in “training” and others used a variety of search phrases such as “website design” and “Karen Scott + training”.
Site Inspector.com
Site Inspector.com will test your website statistics and how it rates. The website www.siteinspector.com offers a free service where you can enter your (or a competitors’) website and test it against factors such as:
- popularity
- HTML coding
- spelling
- links broken/correct
Don’t be too disappointed if your website does not rate highly in the popularity test. Even our most popular Australian website www.start.com.au (according to BRW) only ranks at 20% compared with the worldwide popu-larity. Of these tests the most useful indicators are the HTML and spelling tests. Ask your web designers to correct any simple errors detected in these areas.
The Right Brand
Your domain name should be simple, easy to remember and consistent with your company brand. It may also be beneficial long term to secure both .com (US) and .com.au (Australian) domain names, particularly where your business has the potential to attract overseas consumers or franchises. A small investment in your business name could save you $1,000s later.
Search Engine Registration
At a minimum you should add your completed website to the leading worldwide and Australian search engines. We have listed the top search engines as per recent USA, European and Australian studies:
Top search engines:
World wide
- Altavisa.com
- Northernlight.com
- Hotbot.com
- Lycos.com
- Yahoo.com
- Excite.com
- Infoseek.com
- Snap.com
- Dogpile.com
Australian
- Anzwers.com.au
- Yahoo.com.au
- Excite.com.au
- Webwombat.com.au
- Aaa.com.au
- Sofcom.com.au
- Ozsearch.com.au
Registration of your website is free but time consuming. To achieve better rankings you will need to regularly (once a month) re-register and maintain or make minor updates to your website.
Other things to consider when registering your website, each web page title and description (up to 25 words) will be read by Internet users from search engine results. Think of it as a marketing exercise. What can your message convey in 25 words or less?
Keywords are very important. Brainstorm ways and words in which customers may search for you and include these keywords in your website programming. Ask your website designers about your “meta tag keywords”. If they don’t know what this means – invest in a better web designer!
Good Luck – Aim High!
