• Content – Is your content still relevant to your products or the services you are offering? Has anything about your business changed within the past year? Make sure that your content reflects what you want to say and the message you want to send to potential customers. Is it clear enough? Can visitors find the information they need? No one likes to hit a dead end, so it’s a good idea to go through the pages of your site and make sure that each one offers a link to more information, a call to action or a way to contact you.
• Images – Spring is a good time to take some new photos or splash out on a professional photographer. Good images can make all the difference in creating a website that stands out from the crowd. Check that your existing imagery is still relevant and update any images that look dated. If you’ve made any changes to your business in the past year, this should be reflected through new photos on the site. Think about whether your images are welcoming and invite people to buy your product or service. Spring is an ideal time to take photos, with clear blue skies, fresh foliage and all those gorgeous spring flowers and blossoms that can help sell your product. If outside shots are not suitable, check that you have adequate indoor lighting and that you’re not casting your own shadow in your photos.
• Videos – Videos can help sell your product or service online. It could be as simple as taking a small video from your digital camera and uploading to a free video hosting site like YouTube and then embedding it into your website. (If this sounds a little too technical, give us a call or drop us an email and we can help you out!) Visitors love to be able to see your products or services, especially if they are located elsewhere in the country (or world!).
• Blog – If you don’t have a blog, now is the time to get one! If you do have a blog, have you been making regular updates? You don’t have to be posting blogs every day. Updates could be once a week, once a fortnight or once a month. The important thing is to keep at it and keep it regular. It is disheartening to arrive on a nice website and realise their last update is a year old; it makes you feel as if the site is out of date, so why stick around? A blog helps you to communicate to your visitors, keep them up to date on the latest news and events, and encourage interaction. Not to mention those search engines really love that fresh content. Why not put a spring blog up on your site? There’s no shortage of things to chat about when we finally arrive after a long, cold winter to those stunning spring days, warmer temperatures, outdoor activities and the excitement of summer just around the corner! Your visitors and search engines will love you for it!
• Resources – Do you consider yourself an industry expert? Are you a knowledge base for your field of work? Why not utilise this information and share this on your website? This will not only offer further resources for your visitors, they will be more likely to return to your site again and again. You will be seen as a trusted source for information within your field and you will likely gain many more visitors who may be searching for such information through search engines and arrive on your site because of a particular article, etc. Resources could be as simple as including links to further information, or as extensive as writing dedicated information on your site or on your blog that helps to showcase you as an industry expert.
• Social media – If you don’t have any social media, you’re missing out! No doubt you’ve heard about Facebook and Twitter, and that’s just to name a couple. These are social media sites that are taking the world by storm and you need to be part of it! Make it easy for your visitors to share your information across social media platforms by creating a free Facebook and/or Twitter account. These can be linked with your website in a number of ways and can actually save you time by allowing your website to be the location for core updates which are automatically fed through to your social media pages. By including ‘like’, ‘follow’, ‘tweet’ and ‘connect’ options on your website, you are encouraging visitors to interact with you via your social media pages. If you are making updates to these sites and gaining fans or followers, you’re essentially exposing your business to millions of potential customers – if one fan likes your post, it will show on their page for all their friends to see, etc., etc. until you’re a viral marketing sensation! If you’re interested in the possibilities of social media, give us a call to discuss the many options and find out what might work for your business.
• Call-to-actions – Are you driving visitors to the right areas of your business? Make sure you have a clear idea of your website objectives and what you want people to do when they’re on your site. If you want to increase phone enquiries, do you have a call to action prominently displaying your phone number and a reason for people to get in touch? Do you want to build up your database to be able to send newsletter updates to your customers? If so, do you have a newsletter signup form easily accessible? Perhaps you could include a giveaway or incentive for visitors to subscribe. If you are clear on what you want to achieve through the site, check that your calls to action reflect this on your website.
• Design – Are your branding colours still the same? Do you still have the same logo? Certain designs and colours can start to date after a while. If that is the case for your website, small updates can sometimes make a huge difference. Neutral colours will stand the test of time, those shiny-looking buttons may not!
• Search engines – Let’s face it, you could have the best-looking website in the world, but if that site is not optimised to show within search engines then no one will find you. SEO is a broad term that covers a vast range of different elements that help search engines, like Google, to find you. It’s not a once-off job because the goal posts are always moving, so on-going SEO is recommended to keep benefitting your website and trying to climb the results ladder. Now is good time to analyse how your website is performing and look at ways of increasing this online performance, visitor numbers and sales. Here at TML Web Design, we have a range of SEO options, including on-going optimisation plans. Contact us to find out what we could do for you.
• Do a Google search – Have you Googled your business lately? Do you really know where your business is showing up online? You might be surprised to Google your business and find information about your business on some sites you didn’t even know about. It’s worthwhile doing this every so often to check that all information being published about your company is correct and up to date.

Finished? Ah, now doesn’t that feel great? And if you need a little help with your spring cleaning, give us a call and we’ll pull on our cleaning gloves and give you a hand.

One very important ranking factor is your tags. Both, your title tags and meta tags aren’t visible in the body copy of your website, but people will see this vital information when they are using search engines. On the results page, search engines display search results with a title followed by a two-line description – your title and meta tags. Therefore, the information in both title and meta tags are not only important for search engines, but will entice browsers to click through to your website.

A good title tag should be around 70 characters including spaces (as search engines won’t display more characters). Be sure to include your optimised keywords in your title tag. The same applies to meta tags. However, in meta tags you have a little more room – up to 160 characters including spaces. Make sure you craft a keyword-rich, enticing description of your page. Finally, title and meta tags should be customised for each page of your website.

Other important SEO factors to consider are navigation and links. The navigation of your website should be clear and easy to follow. This not only helps tremendously for user friendliness, but also helps search engines to index your website correctly. As a rule of thumb: if your human visitors get confused, so do search engines, which has, of course, negative effects on your ranking efforts.

With regards to links, lots of incoming links demonstrate your website’s popularity to search engines which is good for ranking. A good internal linking structure (links within your website) also helps with ranking.

Last but not least, the speed at which your website loads is an SEO factor. Factors affecting the loading speed are, for example, the file size of images on your site, your web hosting and the complexity of the code in which your website is written. At TML Web Design we use WordPress to build our websites which generates the fast-loading, simple code that search engines like, and we host your website with a renowned web hosting company. So get in touch and we can design your website or rebuild your existing one!

Firstly, read our post on Copy Writing for the Web. Equipped with this knowledge, there are some additional things to look out for when creating smart SEO body copy. While any keyword-rich web content will help in ranking, you should know how to use your keywords effectively. Firstly, think about keyword phrases rather than single keywords. That means, if you provide Wellington-based boutique B&B and apartment accommodation it isn’t effective to try and rank for the single keyword ‘accommodation’ as you would compete with accommodation providers world-wide. So working with keyword phrases such as ‘Boutique B&B Wellington’ and ‘Apartments Wellington’ makes more sense.

Secondly, you should choose a keyword phrase (or closely related group of keyword phrases) for each page of your website. If you are trying to cover all of your keywords in all of your pages, you’ll end up ranking for nothing. In the accommodation provider example you would, for example, optimise your keywords around B&B accommodation on a B&B page and focus on keywords around apartment accommodation on another page.

Furthermore, you should always include your keyword phrases in headers, and you might consider highlighting some important terms with boldface. (Don’t overdo the latter though!) Finally, search engines love fresh content (and lots of it). This is where regular blogging comes in. If you aren’t confident about writing blogs for your website, TML web design offers excellent blogging services and can help you out – contact us today!

Break it up!
The length of on-page web content should be a minimum of 250 words per page (excluding header and sidebars) because search engines like long text. However, a big block of web content isn’t user-friendly so you should break it up. The aim is to achieve scanable paragraphs of three to four lines as well as sectioned-off content under header tags so your readers can easily scan and consume your content.

Sneak in those keywords!
While you should aim for high keyword density, you don’t want your text to sound too robotic. A great way to fit in extra keywords is in optimised header tags. By using keywords in header tags you can easily up your keyword density by 1%.

Use bullet lists in the right way!
While bullet lists offer great scanability to your reader, search engines regard them as broken content which doesn’t count for as much as other page copy. A way around this is to use a keyword-rich bullet list at the top of the page to outline the page’s content. Do make sure, however, that you have about three lines preceding and following the bullet list, and that you still have a minimum of 250 words of unbroken content on the page. This ensures that search engines still properly index your page but you don’t have to compromise on scanability.

Do your homework!
As with everything in life, you have to do your homework before beginning your web copy writing. Think about your target audience and what they really need and want to know. Make sure your homepage has a very concise synopsis of what you offer. Then tie your copy into specific ‘call to action’ graphics such as joining your newsletter, completing a quote request or adding a product to a shopping cart to move the visitor to take the action you want.

As there is clearly a lot to consider when it comes to writing for the web, we understand if you would prefer to leave it in the hands of the experts and contact us to do your copy writing for you!

Only 1 in 10 websites submitted makes it to their online gallery. We’ve recently had three of our WordPress sites showcased on the site, which is quite an achievement.

The following sites have been accepted into the gallery:

• Christchurch Indulge
• New Zealand Travel Blog
• New Zealand Trade Manual

You can view other WordPress powered websites online at: http://welovewp.com

All TML Web Design websites are hosted with Hostgator in Texas. Hostgator has taken their environmental responsibilities seriously by investing in Green-e certified Renewable Energy Credits (RECs). They use renewable energy to both power and cool their web servers, meaning their servers are 130% powered by wind technology.

This is the equivalent of:

• Removing 444 cars from the road for a year, or
• Saving 5,654 barrels of oil, or
• Protecting 551 acres of forest for a year

That’s got to be good for the environment.

If you’d like to move your web hosting to a green platform, give us a call on 03 366 3340 or email us on info@tmlwebdesign.co.nz.

Around this time we also commenced development of a multimedia CD-ROM – even though many personal computers didn’t even have a CD-ROM drive – in fact we looked back at our marketing materials from this time to find that “50,000 CD-ROM drives are currently in use in New Zealand”. Clearly we were looking ahead to the future. And that future has always included emerging technologies. We’ve seen a lot since the early days – the rise and fall of the Netscape browser (relegated to history thanks to the ‘browser wars’), the dot.com boom and bust, web 1.0, web 2.0, the rise and rise of the Firefox web browser and the growing sophistication of open source web software.

Thanks in large part to the open source movement we can now offer you a suite of web design packages that are full of fantastic features and functionality and the latest web technologies.

We’ve also put you in the control seat of just about everything to do with your website – from uploading images to online photo galleries, to adding new pages and publishing a blog. We know there are many other ways for you to manage your own website, and we’ve seen a lot the content management systems that are out there. We also know from you, that most of them are just too darn hard for regular folk to use. That’s why the content management system we use and recommend is WordPress – which was developed as an open source project 5 years ago by a 19-year old American college student called Matt Mullenweg.

WordPress took off in a big way as a blogging tool, and it’s now used around the world as a web publishing platform for all types of websites – even e-commerce. There is a core group of international developers that are constantly developing the next version of WordPress and literally thousands of independent programmers writing software plugins for WordPress.

So what does this mean for you? It means your website can be run off a system that is both rich in features and functionality yet stunningly simple to use. You can take full advantage of the programming grunt work that happens every day around the world. Never again will you be locked into a proprietary content management system built by one developer who could get run over by a bus.

With one of our web design packages you can run your own blog with an RSS feed that your web visitors can subscribe to, hook your website up to your Facebook page or account, publish your YouTube videos, and make it easy for your visitors to add your site to their social networking profiles and bookmarks.

We’ve entered the age of the ‘mash up’ – pull content from here, push content to there and make it all look good. We can’t think of a better way to do this than with WordPress and the clients we already have on the system were also quick converts!

So give us a call on 03 366 3340 and find out just how your business can benefit from the latest web trends.