Lavender Towers is a Christchurch Bed and Breakfast run by Sandy and Chris McClelland.

The site integrates lavender patterns and imagery as well as photos of the much loved pets that are a big draw card for guests. The site has a blog, RSS feed, and is run using the WordPress publishing system.

Visit: www.lavendertowers.co.nz

We still don’t have flying cars or personal jet propulsion packs, but an online revolution is taking place right before our very eyes. Like most revolutions, it has been a growing movement led by the technology gurus who have seen the future and are staking their claim in the new web space.

With the rapid advances and evolutions taking place online, it’s a very real possibility that some business owners will discover they’ve been caught taking a Sunday drive in the slow lane of the information super highway.

If you’re scratching your head and wondering just how your business can benefit from this new technology, you are not alone. So sit back, relax, grab a coffee, and we’ll help make sense out of the 2010 web and how your business can be prepared for the next decade.

Since the early 90s, groups of individuals have embraced new web technologies. These trends have spread virally, and once there is a critical mass of online users, the business applications soon become apparent. After all, where there are eyeballs, there’s a marketing opportunity. Blogging is the perfect example of a web activity that started out as a personal endeavour but is now also used as a marketing tool. And now we have ‘micro blogging’ sites like Twitter (www.twitter.com) which have reached the point where marketing consultants are telling businesses to start Twittering (and from our experience it does generate new traffic).

So, then, just what does make up the web in 2010. Leading technology blogger Robert Scoble (http://scobleizer.com/) has recently explored this subject. Here are just a few of the trends:

1. It is real time communication, and you can see what is happening online right now. Facebook and Twitter are examples of this technology, with major worldwide events being Twittered in real time before even the major news networks can pick them up.
2. It’s mobile – we’re taking the web with us everywhere we go, thanks to mobile devices like the iphone.
3. It’s more social than ever before, with people having more conversations online, even with the companies they do business with.
4. It’s smart and getting smarter. Robert lists http://www.wolframalpha.com/ as an example. This website has the goal to ‘make all systematic knowledge immediately computable by anyone’.

So what does this mean for you as a business owner? We suggest that you do your homework and choose a website platform that can take full advantage of some of these new trends.

So here’s a 2010 web functionality check list for your business:

• Have an RSS feed on your website so your content can be subscribed to and other web sites can syndicate your content on their site
• Have a blog that is integrated into your website
• Create a Facebook page or a Facebook group
• Have your blog posts automatically published to your Facebook page
• Be able to import your images from Facebook into your website
• Get a Twitter account
• Have your blog posts automatically published to your Twitter account
• Connect your Flickr images account with your website

If you’d like to get a 2010-ready website, give us a call on 03 366 3340 or email info@tmlwebdesign.co.nz.

Many websites attract at least 40% of their visitors from the search engines, with the remaining visitors coming from a link, or from typing the address into the browser directly.  Therefore knowing what people are searching for can give you a huge competitive advantage in Google.

The primary goal with search is to attract the visitors that are the most likely to convert into a genuine enquiry. These are the visitors that have searched for a phrase that you have optimised your website to rank well for.

To attract the right type of visitors you need to know

1. The keyword phrases that are currently generating clicks to your website via search
2. The most popular keyword phrases searchers are using in the search engines

How to tap into your website’s keyword referrals

At least once a month you should check what keyword phrases have generated visits to your website. You can get this information from your website visitor statistics which are provided as part of your hosting. If you don’t have web stats with your hosting, you can sign up for Google Analytics for free (you just need the code added to your website) see http://www.google.com/analytics/.

Your website stats offer a great source of intelligence about how your site is performing in Google, as you can discover exactly what content is attracting people to your site. It can make very interesting reading, and you may be quite surprised at some of the phrases used. Knowing this information will tell you a) what keywords you are ranking for and b) which keywords are the most popular. You’ll also get to see keyword trends over time, and this will generate ideas for new content like articles, blog posts and offers.

Discover the keyword phrases people use in the search engines

There are a number of ways to find out which keyword phrases people are typing into the search engines. This information is extremely valuable, as you may discover that people are using completely different words than you expected, or at least different combinations of words.

One of the best places to start your research is with Google. If you want to tap into the wider search space check out the Google’s Zeitgeist feature at http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist/index.html.

Google also has a very impressive tool called ‘trends for websites’ which shows the traffic trends for major websites. Want to know what kiwis have been searching in the last month? Wonder no more – just click on http://www.google.com/insights/search/#geo=NZ&date=today%207-d&cmpt=q

To research specific keyword phrases check out the Google AdWords keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. From this site you can enter in phrases and see how many searches a phrase gets in a month (and you can tailor the results to New Zealand). Other keyword tools include http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/ and http://www.wordtracker.com/ which both have free trials available.

If you’d like more help with keyword research or improving your rankings in Google call us on 03 366 3340 or email info@tmlwebdesign.co.nz

Search engine optimisation is the term used to describe work completed by a search engine optimiser (SEO). SEO’s become experts in how search engines rank websites in the search results.

Performing well in the search engines is vital to the success of your website, but there’s a lot of competition which can make it challenging. Most web searchers won’t go past the first 10 results in Google and in most industries there are dozens if not hundreds of websites jostling to get into those first ten spots.

So what is the magic formula to get to the top of Google? Well, only Google knows for certain, as they use a secret algorithm to rank websites. But there is widespread general agreement about the basic things you can do to rank well. These include;

1. Getting links from other websites

Google takes into account how popular a website is when it ranks it against other websites. Google does this by determining how many links are going to the website. It also factors in the quality of these links. So you want to get lots of links from other websites, but especially so from sites that are very popular.

2. Good content

Well written content helps considerably with your rankings in Google. So make sure you use the words people will put into a search engine.

3. Adding more content on a regular basis

Adding more content to your website helps in two ways. Firstly, Google will know you are updating your site more often so will visit your site on a frequent basis (which means new pages can get into Google quickly). And secondly, the more topics you can cover in articles or blog posts the more visitors you can draw to your website via search and links.

4. Pay attention to your title tags

A title tag is a piece of HTML code that tells the search engines what your website is about. Every page on your website needs to have a different title tag that includes your keyword phrases.

5. Well worded description tags

A description tag is a piece of HTML code that describes in a short sentence what a web page is about. This description is shown in the search engines, so it’s important that it is enticing to searchers and it should also include your keyword phrases.

6. Include your keywords in your page address (URL)

The words used in your page name create the final URL (or web address) for a specific page. So if the page is about dog grooming services, an ideal URL and page name would be www.doggroomers.co.nz/dog-grooming/.

To find out more about search engine optimisation and how we can improve your ranking in Google give us a call on 03 366 3340.

A keyword domain name uses the words you would like your website to rank well for in Google. For example, a dog trainer might register dogtrainer.co.nz. In addition to getting a keyword domain name, you should also register your business name or brand name.

When ranking a website, Google takes into account the words used in a link to the website. So if links to your website contain keywords then the link text is going to help with your rankings, as Google will consider your website to be ‘relevant’. A relevant website is one that uses the keywords someone searches for (either in the HTML code or in the web copy).

And it’s not just the words used in your domain name that can help with rankings; the words used in the page names of your website can also help considerably, so a page about dog training services should be called dogtraining.html rather than services.html.

To get the full benefit out of a keyword domain name it needs to go to a website and not just be a ‘redirect’. A redirect is where a domain name goes to a website with a different domain name. Google will ignore the domain name if it’s just redirecting to another domain name.

The solution is to use a keyword domain name for your main website, or to set up a secondary website. This secondary website could be a blog, a forum or a new website that is about a specific topic. To continue with the dog trainer example, the trainer could write a blog about their training experiences with tips for dog owners, set up a forum so dog owners can swap information, while the specialist website could be about training a particular breed of dogs.

If you are thinking that all the good domain names have probably gone then you might just be in for a surprise. We regularly discover premium keyword domain names that have expired and are now available to be registered.

If you’d like help finding a keyword domain name give us a call on 03 366 3340 and speak to one of our web consultants. We can also help you develop a blog or website for the new domain name.