If you want to find out if your domain name contact details are correct or when your, or any, domain name expires, go to the Nominet Website. You will find a search field that is labelled “WHOIS”. Enter the domain name into this field, such as “bbc.co.uk”. Please omit the “www” bit. You will then be presented with a page that contains information relating to your domain name.

Please click here to see what a WHOIS search for the BBC.co.uk domain name will look like.

On the data page, you will see the registrant’s address if the registrant decided to display it. You will also see when the domain name was purchased and when it will expire.

Furthermore, you can find out the domain name server settings of a particular domain name. This will then allow you to find out about the web hosting company.

If you have lost your paperwork, this WHOIS lookup can be very useful to recover missing information about your domain name and your web hosting.

Also, if you want to purchase a particular .co.uk domain name and you know that it is not in use, you can wait until it becomes available and purchase it after a certain period it has to lapse without being renewed.

The following page contains links to some very useful SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) tools and a short explanation of what they do.

PageRank Tool – enter a URL and find out the PR of the website (this will take you away from the MM website!):

Google Trends – enter a key phrase – for example “Marketing Agency” and Google will tell you how the key phrase developed over the years.

Keyword Density Tool – this will detect the keyword density on your website. A density of 2-4 % is regarded as good.

What is important to get a good position in Search Engines? You need excellent and up-to-date content on your website and you need a large number of external websites linking to your website.

You need to think about the following points when you target websites for link exchanges.

If you don’t want to pay a company to do SEO for you, there are a lot of things you can do yourself which can improve your search engine ranking.

Research first…

Go to the Google website and enter the search term that you think people would enter to find your website – for example – “Web design West Lothian“. Have a look at the first 10-20 results that come up and check out your competitors. Make a note of their web addresses – such as www.domainname.com. Then enter the following words into the Google search field and press the Search button:

• link:www.domainname.com

- replacing domainname.com with the competitors domain name of course. The result pages will show you which pages provide links to your competitor’s website. Have a look at these websites and check if they allow you to add a link to your website too. Then follow the procedure outlined below (How to get link exchanges).

Another thing to do is trying to find web directories that provide listings for certain business categories. Always check if these directories are actually used and have a PR – PageRank. Some websites look like directories, but they are actually link farms – all they provide is links to websites that no-one knows. Adding a link to a link farm can do your website harm and you won’t benefit from that at all.

This is a directory you can get listed in, for example: FreeIndex

PR – Google PageRank

The Google PageRank is an indicator of how “popular” a website is regarded by Google and how much Google thinks of your website. When you launch a brand-new website, your PR will be 0 – simply because Google does not know about your website. If you then build up links that point to your website and if Google has found your website, it will start changing this PR. If you maintain your website regularly and keep it up to date, add content and so on, Google will reward you by increasing your PR. This will not happen over night though, this can take months, if not years! So don’t expect to achieve a PR of 8 if your website only consists of 5 pages. If you display lots of relevant content on your website, Google will increase the PR over time. The PR of the homepage is initially higher than the rest of your pages, but the PR is fed down over time. For example, if your Homepage has a PR of 3, you can expect your sublevel pages to have a PR of 2.

Google will not “count” links that come from website with a very low or no PR. You can either install the Google Toolbar in your Web Browser, or you can use the PR Checker on the SEOCHAT website to find out if a website has a good “google reputation”, ie. a high PR. A high PageRank is a PR that is 3 or higher. A really good PR is 5, 6, 7, 8. The highest PR that can be achieved is 10. Probably the one of the busiest websites in the UK is the BBC website – which currently has a PR of 9 (April 2010).

If a website has no PR or a PR of only 1, Google will simply give the link that comes from that website much value.

What websites should link to my website?

If you operate a website for a local Garden Centre and want to raise awareness about your Garden Centre online and want to be found by a Search Engine, you should try to place links on websites that have to do with Gardening, Flowers, Plants and so on.

Placing a link on a local bookshop website will not do your website any harm, but it won’t give you any benefits either. Google and some other search engines simply ignore links from websites that are not relevant to your business. So try to concentrate your linking efforts on websites that are relevant to your business.

How to get link exchanges?

If you find a website that you think would be good for a link exchange, search for the link page on that particular website. If there is no link page to be seen, don’t waste your time, they won’t suddenly create a link page for adding your link to it.

Some link pages encourage link exchanges and already provide a form – prepared for you to fill in. If there is no form available, you can contact the webmaster of the website by email and ask them for a link exchange. You will usually find a contact page or a link to the webmaster’s email address. You should always offer a reciprocal link on your website which points to their website. You ask them for a favour, so you should offer something in return. Usually, you would write a personal message to the webmaster of a website telling them why their website would benefit from adding your link and that you already have added their link to your website because you liked their website very much.

Sometimes you get a reply that a link has been added to their links page, sometimes, link exchange requests are simply ignored. If nothing has happened within a month, you can remove the link you added to your website because they are obviously not interested in adding any more links to their website.

Don’t just contact any website under the sun and ask them for a link exchange. This will not do your website any good and it will waste your time too.

Content Content Content

Imagine your company specialises in selling snowboards for children. There are probably quite a few companies out there who do the same – selling snowboards for children. Maybe your company plans to sell snowboards online where people can make credit card payments online. Therefore, you need to convince your website visitors that your snowboards are the ones they should buy, and not your competitor’s! How do you do that?

Imagine you have 2 children you want to introduce to snow boarding. You go to Google and you enter “snowboards for children”. You look at the first few results (made up examples here):

• UK Specialist for Snowboards for Children – Company XYZ
  Online store with extensive information on safety and snowboarding for children
• XYZ – based in London, Snowboard by BRAND
  BRAND-X A2, BRAND-Y 4B, company existed since 1984.

Which link do you click on? Most likely on the first one because it is tailored around you and your concerns.

The following page will discuss a few points why your great website appears in Google and how you can improve your product / service pages.

People visit your website because they want to find out more about the product they want to buy or the service they are looking for. They don’t have enough information to make a buying decision, they want to inform themselves and find a company which offers the product they are after. There are two different kinds of clients out there:

• Visitors who are looking for information, but are not ready to buy.
• Visitors who have enough information and are ready to buy.

Visitors who are looking for information

Many people search the web to find information about products and services. Some people want to figure out different product options available, others want to compare prices, or they want to know about advantages / disadvantages of a certain product.

You need to cater for website visitors who are just browsing. If you don’t give them enough information to stay, they won’t even consider your company when they are ready to make a buying decision.

Back to our snowboard example. The website should have a clear structure with information about snowboarding which is free and which can be read by potential clients without them having to submit their details. The free advice can already recommend certain snowboards for certain needs – beginners, advanced, certain sizes etc. The free advice can also provide links to particular items in the online shop. The website should then contain an online shop which lists available snowboards and accessories in a logical order. The shop should be easy to navigate and it should encourage visitors to include additional items other than just a snowboard (such as suits, gloves etc.).

An individual product page should include a photograph of the product – or maybe even more than one photograph. The product page should include a clear headline which includes not just the brand and model number but also the generic term of the product – ie. Snowboard. So a typical headline could be: “BRAND-A 123XL Snowboard” rather than just “BRAND-A 123XL“. Some of your visitors will be completely new to your products. To give you another example – if someone wants to buy a bike, and has not cycled for a long time or never before – they won’t be able to distinguish between a “Hybrid” or a “Mountain Bike”.

The product description should be quite comprehensive. It should include a description – which in turn can include a number of keywords and key phrases, it should include sizes, colours, materials etc. compatibility if required – all depending on what you sell. The more information you provide the better. You keep your website visitor on your site. They will acknowledge that you have provided lots of information and they will read the information – because that’s why they visited your website in the first place.

Big bonus – you will keep the search engines happy – because they are able to pick up the keywords in the product description.

If you only provide a small bit of text, visitors can look at it and will immediately leave, because there is no reason to stay, nothing to read, nothing to look at. Search Engines have no content to add to their databases and your site will most likely not be listed in the results.

Have a look at the Amazon website. Select any book and have a look at the product page of a particular book. You will see that they include masses of information about every book they sell. The number of pages, if it’s a hardcover, the author of the book, the category of the book and so on. They also include a summary of the book and reviews submitted by readers. All these things lead a website visitor to a buying decision. They feel they have gathered enough information to buy the desired item.

Visitors who have enough information and are ready to buy

You can distinguish between the price hunters and the visitors who only buy from established websites / companies. If you sell products online, you will most likely have a price displayed for each product. The visitor has gathered enough information – either on your website or elsewhere – and is ready to buy, to spend money.

If you have a good price for your product, you might catch the price hunters, but you won’t impress people who want to buy from a website that looks established and well-looked after. So in any case, providing more information is better than doing a quick job and your website will do better in search engines.

The homepage is the last page you write

When you have a new website developed, the designer will show you an example of your website design which most likely contains words that cannot be read. This text which usually starts with the words “Lorem Ipsum” is called “greeking” and it is not a language. It is simply dummy text which allows you to take in your website design without being distracted by meaningful text. The design is about the layout of the website, not the content. That’s the reason why no real text or content is used so that you – the client – can concentrate on the look and feel of your website. Have a look at this example so you understand what we mean.

Example of Greeking

Once the design is signed off, the developer can go ahead and start developing your website. Some developers will ask you to provide all content at the start of the development. It’s sometimes better to hold back until the website is almost ready to go live.

The website structure has to be discussed first before you start developing the site. For industry sites for example – the smaller the number of clicks to the information the visitor wants the better. Your website visitors don’t have any time to look for the information. Give them the information they want – fast.

Think about what your company offers, what is your most important service / product – and who is your most important type of client – this will help you guide into the right direction for your site structure.

If a company deals mainly with architects for example, having a link called “architects” on the homepage will greatly please any architect that visits your site, because they immediately feel welcome.

The most common mistake some companies still make is adding lots of content on the homepage which is about the company and not about their products. This puts the company in the center rather than the client. This should be avoided and a summary of the services and/or products you offer should be highlighted on the homepage.

Websites follow the same structure as authors who write books: They write the book first and then they write the introduction – the first page. Once your website is almost ready, you will know the content of the different pages and you can better provide a summary of your main products / services.

The best thing is to test-drive the site with web visitors who know nothing about the product/service your company offers. Ask them – without clicking on any other pages – if they know what you do and what you specialise in just by looking on your homepage.

Keywords are King

So you company develops blue medium-sized widgets. Put yourself into your clients’ shoes and visit open up Google. In order to buy blue medium-sized widgets, what would you enter in Google to find a website that sells blue medium-sized widgets? – Yes, correct – you would enter “blue medium sized widgets”. That’s why you need to include keywords into your content, exactly those keywords your website visitors would use in Search Engines to find websites like yours. So if you have content on your website that describes your company history, you missed a big chance, because the company history will not highlight blue medium sized widgets.

Keywords vs Key Phrases

What’s a keyword? – A keyword is a single word such as “photography“, or “design“, or “website“.

What’s a key phrase? - A key phrase consists of several keywords, such as “web design west lothian“, “commercial photography Bathgate“. When people perform a search in Google, for example, they have learnt that key phrases will give them a better result rather than just single keywords. If you are trying to find a web designer, and you only enter “web design” in Google, you will spend the next year trying to go through the millions and millions of result pages that are displayed. However, if you enter “Web Design Bathgate“, you will more likely find a web designer that is located in Bathgate.

Homepage Content – Examples

Have a look at the below examples for some homepage content.

CreatWeb is a web design company based in Bathgate, West Lothian who specialise in website design, website maintenance, website updates, search engine optimisation, website translation, and commercial photography. CreatWeb have developed an impressive website portfolio which clearly demonstrates the diversity of industries for which we develop websites.

This small paragraph summarises what CreatWeb do and where we do it. If you are a national company, you can re-phrase this:

CreatWeb is a web design company in the UK who specialise in designing websites, website maintenance, website updates, search engine optimisation, German & French website translation, and commercial photography.

The keyphrases used in the two examples are as follow:

• web design company
• West Lothian
• website design
• website maintenance
• website updates
• search engine optimisation
• commercial photography
• web design company UK
• German & French website translation