The sun is shining outside, the office windows are open and a scarf and gloves are no longer necessary commuting equipment. Spring is definitely in the air! It’s time for a spring clean and we don’t mean at home – we mean online. Just like your office drawers, your website can become cluttered with out-of-date and irrelevant material over time. If you don’t make time to periodically clean it out, you risk your website becoming ineffective. Here at TML Web Design, we think spring cleaning is always easier with a list, so here’s a handy checklist of hints to bring your website back up to scratch.

• 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.

Once you have mastered SEO or Search Engine Optimisation with regard to keywords and general copywriting for the web, there are more things you can do to improve your website’s ranking in search engines.

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!

The search engine ranking power of your website depends on a whole lot of factors and approaching SEO or Search Engine Optimisation can look a daunting task. Not so with TML Web Design’s SEO Basics! We have compiled an easy introduction to using keywords for SEO so you can improve the ranking of your website by following some quick SEO tips.

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!

Everyone wants good rankings for their websites. Everyone wants user-friendly content. Everyone wants high searchability. Well, here’s how you can achieve all of this with some simple TML web copy writing tips. The magic trick is to write web content which is optimised and keyword-rich but still reads natural rather than robotic.

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!

What is Facebook?

Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you’ve probably heard of Facebook. To say it’s had quite an impact on the web is something of an understatement; it has on occasion received more traffic than Google. For better or worse, anyone you have ever known (including great aunts, annoying ex-workmates and very old school friends) can find out you are on Facebook and ask to be your ‘friend’. Whether you accept or not is totally up to you, but it can be quite the social conundrum!

So what is Facebook exactly? Well, it is technically a social networking website where people can communicate with each other via private or public messages or ‘wall posts’. The communication can be quite passive – you post to your wall and all of your friends automatically get the post in their ‘news feed’ – or people can write directly onto their friends’ walls or send private messages to each other (like email). Facebook users can also upload photos (and restrict which friends can view them), join interest and hobby groups and become fans of pages. Pages can be about absolutely anything you could possibly think of, so if you hate Mondays you can join or start a group or a page and share with each other why Mondays suck so much!

Why go on Facebook?

When used as a personal communication tool, it’s a great way of keeping in touch with people, organising social and networking events, and staying up-to-date with your interests. As a business tool, Facebook is a very powerful way to utilise viral marketing to promote your business. As of July 2010, there were more than 500 million people on Facebook from around the world including 1.7 million New Zealanders – that’s quite an audience. To use it for business, we recommend you set up a Facebook page (follow the step by step instructions below). But before you can do that, you need to have an account on Facebook for your personal profile. You need the account to attach the Facebook page to, but it is up to you how much information you put online, and you can restrict who can see it via the privacy settings.

How to create a Facebook page

Here’s how you get started on Facebook

Create a Facebook account or login to your Facebook account if you have one. You can create an account from the Facebook homepage at www.facebook.com.

1. Go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php.
2. Choose the ‘Official Page’ option, choose the Business option, and then choose the category your business fits into from the drop-down box.
3. Enter your Page Name into the Page Name box (e.g. Acme Hotel).
4. Tick the ‘I’m the official representative….” box (you might want to read the Facebook terms and conditions and the specific Page terms online at http://www.facebook.com/terms_pages.php.
5. Click the ‘Create Official Page’ button.
6. You will now be directed to your page.
7. Upload an image to your page. The image will be displayed in the image box at the top of the page and as a smaller image in your posts to the wall.
8. If you don’t want your page to be visible to everyone just yet, go to Edit Page, click Edit under Settings and change Published to Unpublished.
9. Wall settings – set up your permissions for your wall (who can write on it).
10. Mobile settings – you will be assigned a unique email address that you can send emails to. The emails will show up as wall posts on your page.  Note down the address if you want to update your page this way. You can also update your page via text messaging and will need to activate this by sending a text to the number shown during the Text Activation (Telecom and Vodafone are currently supported).
11. Work your way through the remaining settings. For example you may want to add the Review box so people can leave reviews about your business.
12. Write a short description about your business by clicking on the text box under the image.
13. Twitter option – if you are on Twitter www.twitter.com you can connect your Facebook page to Twitter so your updates are automatically published to your Twitter account.
14. Blog import – import your blog (if you have one). Your blog has an RSS feed (real simple syndication) which means it can be published on other websites like Facebook. From the Edit Page section, go to Notes and click Edit – go to the bottom of the page and look for ‘Edit Import Settings’. You can now import your blog (enter your website address into the box).
15. Now go to your Wall and write your first post. It could be as simple as “Welcome to our new Facebook page”.

Promoting your Facebook Page

1. Start by ‘Liking’ your own page as this will show up in your friends’ news feeds.
2. Send a message to your Facebook friends directly by clicking on the ‘Suggest to Friends’ link. Your friends will get an email from you suggesting that they like your page.  You’ll be surprised at how many friends of friends will also become fans.
3. Consider promoting your page with an advert (you can set a daily budget). At the time of writing there were 1.7 million New Zealanders over the age of 13 on Facebook.
4. Promote the page on your website with a ‘Like’ box. With a ‘Like’ box visitors to your website can ‘like’ your Facebook page with one click (so they become a fan). They can also see recent posts from the page and how many people like the page.
5. Add a ‘Like’ button to your website. The button differs from the ‘Like’ box as it’s just a button, and when a visitor to your site clicks on it, the link to your website will be added to their Facebook profile.

If you get stuck or need some guidance, the team at TML Web Design can set up your page for you, import your RSS feed, add your images and publish your page. Just give us a call on 03 366 3340 or email info@tmlwebdesign.co.nz.