There are two main applications for websites; a “discovery tool” for new and existing customers and a “digital brochure”. The former is what all good SEO companies should be recommending their clients strive for, as it allows a company or business to use their website as an automatic marketing tool. Basically, as users naturally search online for their interests or needs, any related websites should naturally be discovered. Therefore, if you are looking for an electrician in Plymouth, then your web searches should bring up companies who can offer the correct services.

However, as the web has grown and has become more and more popular and easier to create websites, it is becoming harder and harder for businesses to reach their target audience. It used to be that a company could put up a “static” website containing just a few pages and earlier versions of the search engines we know and love would serve them up to searchers. This no longer work, these small static websites are what we call “digital brochures”, they don’t rank well in search engine results pages and only really work if you can provide a customer or client with the exact website address that they can type into an internet browser.

So, in order for a website to rank in decent positions in results pages, not only do they need to provide a decent amount of relevant (and unique) content from the get-go, they need to keep adding content, constantly developing the site with additional fresh content.

This is what is happening with Surf Bay Leisure. As with all businesses, they cannot sit back and solely rely on their reputation and stock of new and used caravans to push them up through search engine results, they need to develop their site, adding further information on the caravans and log cabins for sale.  As such,  they are currently developing a section of their website to help visitors locate caravan parks in the area of the South West they are interested in. This is a newly developed section which will be constantly updated with further information to enhance the visitor’s exepreince whilst visiting the site and also to help improve how  the website ranks in search engine result pages.

www.surfbayleisure.co.uk

In the context of this design, the previous site had no logical navigational structure. It did have a lot of great pages and great content so the site did get a lot of hits but the lack of logical navigational system caused problems. The main issue is potential clients just leaving as there was no web site navigation. You can see the impact through the bounce rate. If you don’t provide online visitors the option to navigate from the page that they land on to other pages on the site, they will just leave. This leads to a higher than average bounce rate and a lower than average time spent on the site. A lack of web design navigation could also potentially damage search engine rankings and will lead to a lower conversion ratio.

The conclusion is therefore, if you want to improve the conversion ratio of your site, getting online visitors to achieve the goals that the site is set out to achieve, make sure that you have a logical and ordered navigational system. Offer visitors the option to contact you, read about you and read about alternative products and services that you may offer. In our opinion, having a logical and functional navigational system is one of the three key elements for a successful web site design. When thinking about your site, in its current format or in a future design, put yourself in the place of a potential client and try to work out how you think the most optimal and efficient process for navigating could be set out.

When designing websites for solicitors, we will listen to your design ideas and requirements in order to design and create a website which looks professional, performs well in search results for the services your company offers and provides all regulatory information.

We understand that first impressions count and so design websites for lawyers which make a positive and memorable impact when visitors land on your website, whilst ensuring all company services and contact details are easy to find, providing “calls to action” which ensure potential clients will contact you to discuss their needs.

Our website design process involves covering all aspects of the services you provide and any features you require on your website and will be created using our bespoke templating system or a powerful and robust CMS (content management system) enabling simple updates and pages to be added.

Gold Coast Media were recently commissioned to create a personal injury compensation solicitor website design which included a live case study book to provide visitors and potential clients with examples of cases which had been recently won. Thanks to our bespoke website design package, it is a simple and easy procedure for the solicitor to add new cases as and when the need to.

Communication is an important factor for solicitors and lawyers, and as such, websites for solicitors and lawyers that we design keep this point in mind, in order to emphasise it initially and make it simple for the visitor to contact you for further information.

However far down the solicitor website design trail you are, Gold Coast Media will help you get your website to a stage where it portrays your professionalism and improve where it ranks on search engine results pages in order to get it seen by more potential clients.

We are proud that our professional website design techniques allow us to offer websites for solicitors and lawyers to provide a complete website package that represents your business image and ethos. We take the website design and creation process seriously, realising that the product we deliver is a direct representation of your reputation and ours.

Our bespoke e commerce website package will be tailored around your needs and your products.  At Gold Coat Media, we take you, your product, your target market and your business into account in our website design to best develop and maintain an e commerce website which works for you and with you.

The Magento e commerce website package “backend” gives you access to analytics and reports to monitor stock levels, discounts and any offers you run. Reports give you up-to-the-minute stock levels, as well as sales figures such as total sales, recent purchases, top searches and “abandoned” shopping carts from both registered users and guest customers.

Our Magento web designers can either incorporate your shopping cart system into your current website or we can make the entirety of your website an online shop, depending on your products and requirements.  We will combine your e commerce website with search engine optimisation techniques to provide a complete website solution which delivers results to you and your customers.

Magento can be integrated into website designs regardless of your product and can be used to sell physical and digital products (such as music or ebooks) online in any quantity. Through discussion we will ensure that your website design is exactly what you want and that you are happy with the package.

Previously, we have successfully created e commerce websites for companies including Catherine Bishop who is successfully using a bespoke website solution with Magento integrated into the design in order to sell Jewellery in Devon.

We are always happy to discuss website ideas with you if you are not sure if selling products online is a route you wish to go down. Our website designers will take the time to explain the benefits of an online shop and talk you through the entire process from initial design through to getting your website online and the daily interaction between you, your Magento website and your customers.

We are proud professional website designers and Magento website designers who take your business as seriously as we take our own. We will ensure your e commerce website package not only delivers a fantastic experience for your customers, but also illustrates your business image and approach. Throughout the design and creation process, we are fully aware that our website is a depiction of your reputation and ours.

With a focus on ecommerce website design, Gold Coast Media can create a jewellery website design for clients who require a complete ecommerce package which allows them to manage stock levels and provide customers with an easy to use and safe jewellery website.

It is important when considering ecommerce website design to provide ample opportunities for search engine optimisation for each of the products in the jewellery website. This is so any customers who are searching for either a specific jewellery product or who are searching generally for jewellery, the ecommerce website will appear at the top of the results.

There are many niches in the jewellery sector and Gold Coast Media can deliver a bespoke website design for an ecommerce package which will appeal to the target market and delivery strong results in terms of sales and search engine results. A good example of this is the Lovelinks online jewellery shop. Lovelinks are customisable bracelet charms with a wide variety of charms available in different styles and designs.

The jewellery website design includes a page dedicated to each individual charm which has been optimised in order to rank well in search engine results pages as well as provide the customer with at least one zoomable image. The overall website theme has been designed with the type of client in mind, providing a clean and easy to navigate system to ensure sales are completed.

When a sale is made, the jewellery ecommerce package automatically adjusts stock levels and the sales team are notified that a sale has been made, providing an overview of the products sold as well as delivery options and any special wrapping or packaging options.

The “backend” of the bespoke ecommerce package allows for administration of all products and any special offers, discount codes or sale drives as required. Reports can be created to provide a wealth of information such as number of products sold in a given period, popular jewellery searches, low stocks, best sellers and “abandoned carts”.

Gold Coast Media is proud to be able to offer jewellery website design and ecommerce website design for customers as a complete and competitively priced package. For more information on ecommerce website design by jewellery website designers Gold Coast Media, please contact us and we will be happy to talk you through our process and provide you with a complete jewellery website design quote.

Link building can play an important role in improving search engine rankings and a common link building technique is submitting a website to a directory which will include a link on their site pointing to yours. This will of course improve your visibility to any visitors to that site, but that is not necessarily the main aim with link building with directories. The main aim is in fact to increase a site’s visibility to search engines as it crawls through the directory.

Search engine crawling is exactly what it sounds like; search engine “spiders” literally crawl through an entire website, looking at everything and following every link (picture links as paths), indexing (recording) what it finds.

Illustratively speaking, for external links – say from the directory to your website – these spiders carry with them “link juice”, which can be thought of as the “impression” the spider has of the site’s content. So if the directory is thought to be of high value, it will receive a good ranking (say a Google Page Rank of 8), and any outward links benefit from being linked to from a valuable site, and will therefore be regarded as being of value as well.

No one outside of Google knows exactly what the algorithms are or what the theory is behind how websites are rated (that’s half the fun of SEO!), but it’s believed that part of Google’s long-term goal is to improve the quality of information provided, more importantly, how it is delivered, encouraging something akin to conversations between people.

The “website as a conversation” analogy actually works quite well; say you asked your friend to recommend five builders to you, you could fairly safely assume that the first suggestion they provide would be the best; the second suggestion would be second best and so on.

That is how outward links seem to work with Google’s rankings. If your website is the first outward link on the Page Rank 8 directory, it will be deemed to be of the best value, if the link to your website is at the bottom of the page, it will be viewed to hold less value. That is the reason why directories will offer “Featured” adverts –  they are always placed at the top of a page – first to be viewed by human visitors and gauged to be of top value by search engines.

Keeping with our natural conversation analogy, another important factor to consider is context. If your friend was listing their top five builders and number four turns out to be a favourite band, it would be of no value to you. Google thinks the same, considering links to related content to be worth more and links to unrelated content to be worth less. So for this reason, it is of very little value to list your website about builders for example, on a directory providing details on the best cover bands – even if it does have a Page Ranking of 7 or 8.

Most web directories offer three options for submissions: “Featured”, “Standard” and “Reciprocal”.  We have covered “Featured” already, and “Standard” adverts are pretty much what it says on the tin, your website gets listed in the main part of the site, under the “Featured” adverts.

I think “Reciprocal” adverts – which are the free option – are the clever ones. When the directory lists your website for free, you agree to put a link on your website back to the directory. Now, this can almost be seen as an investment by the directory. You are obviously on a drive to improve your search engine rankings, so the chances are your page rank is low, and you probably aren’t making much money from the site yet (if that’s your goal), meaning you won’t want to pay for a directory listing, so instead you put a link back to the directory on your site. Over time, you keep on plugging away at improving your search results and as a result your Page Rank gets better, and all the time you have been sending the “link juice” back to the directory, which has benefited from all your efforts as well. Ok, so maybe it isn’t that clever, but I like it and it’s a true “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” situation.

Generally, there is a positive correlation between a directory’s Page Rank and the fees it charges, and link building with directories is sometimes frowned upon by a few people, one reason being that those with endless pots of money can add their site to every directory they wish. Another reason – possibly the main reason – is because content-unspecific directories go against what Google is trying to achieve – those natural conversations. So if you are going to submit to directories (and you probably should), then make sure you select them carefully. Take the time to find directories which are specific to your target audience and don’t be tempted to submit to unrelated directories, no matter what their page rank is.

When you build a system that makes it easy for those of less technical capabilities to create, manage and update a website or a blog, there is inevitably a trade off. That statement rings true about so many aspects of our lives, the more complicated something is, the more difficult it is to port out the subject or object to the general public and get them to use it. Worpress is a huge success from this perspective. It allows the creation of a blog or website with relative ease, the blogs can be made more complicated but it is well within the capabilities of people with less than professional design and coding capabilities, to create a great blog with fantastic content.

However, using WordPress does present some challenges. Gold Coast Media like to design super clean websites with minimal code, this allows the spiders to access the juicy bits (text in this case) with ease. The negative side of using WordPress is that the software, by making it easier to create a site, also includes code that could be made much cleaner. This presents a challenge for businesses and site owners that want to use WordPress and achieve high rankings because you often have to work that little bit harder to get the same ranking outcome, ceteris paribus.

There are some great plugins though to help with WordPress SEO – or on site optimisation – that are well supported with a wealth of optimisation capabilities and enhancements. WordPress SEO by Yoast is one of our favourites because it is really easy to implement and offers all of the on site capabilities that are required in an easy to use, simplistic but effective manner. This is utilised by us for many clients and recommended by third parties that we work with such as France Wedding Photographer, Simon Whitten. The All In One SEO Pack is a similar tool that is very effective in helping you to manage your on site optimisation, title tags and meta descriptions. We also really like SEO Ultimate which is a really powerful SEO for WordPress Plugin that we use on a regular basis for our WordPress blogs and clients blogs including this blog right here.

The point really is that if you are using WordPress, you will need a little help to ensure that your blog posts are actually read. There is no point in creating good content if it doesn’t rank well and doesn’t get any visitors. WordPress SEO is a very important factor in creating a blog that will be found by Google and therefore potential visitors. Have a browse through the Seo for WordPress Plugins above to help your blog progress – enjoy!

Obviously, it isn’t that simple, text seo is great but it has to have some structure, you can’t just add any old gibberish, it has to make sense and be relevant to the site. The first thing that we did was to analyse where we stood at the start, you can’t optimise a site and talk to a client unless you know your starting point. We split the business up into target markets from food packaging to pharma and confectionery packaging. We ended up with one main area of business and six specific niche sectors. The next step is to carry out keyword research, I’ll put another post up about keyword research in the future. We identified roughly 30 keywords strings to target for the generic manufacturers of packaging market and for the sub sectors, got our metrics back and identified the clients current position in the first top 100 results for each keyword string. With no text on the home page, they just didn’t rank anywhere.

The next step is the text, we identified the areas and asked the client to write the text for us, there is no point in an seo company writing about your business, do it yourself. Our client came up with the goods and we carried out some simple seo techniques such as bolding, italicising, creating header tags and optimising the title and meta description. The result was virtually instant. Helped by a domain that is old and trusted by Google, the client suddenly started getting hits from keyword strings that didn’t include their business name. Within a month, the number of hits to the site was up over 100%. There you go, living proof that google loves text, feed it and it will love you. Atlas is an early stage client for us and there is a massive amount of work to do but sometimes, simple things can have the biggest effect so don’t forget your home page text!!!!!

Before we get to the branding bit though, we thought that we’d pass on a simple bit of advice that we treat all of our customers too. There are three primary aspects of web sites that work and construction that are essential. If you get all three of these correct, you should do well if your target market is well researched, miss any one of these and you are building a big wall that will block your way to online success.

The first is design and branding, you have to get this right. You need a brand, even if your domain and target market are generic, your brand should be reflected in your domain name. Our clients, ‘I Am’ Associates, reflect their brand in their domain and on their web site, it is distinctive and it will sit in your mind. That is the point, a great brand will have impact and is one of the easiest ways to gain online traction, especially in the world of social media. Your website should be well designed to reflect your brand and the products or services that you offer. It should be instantly obvious and memorable as to who you are and what you do.

The second key element is navigation. In our experience, high bounce rates are virtually always associated with poor navigation. If your design and branding is right, at least a potential client will take the time to look deeper into your site but if the navigation is poor, they will still leave. Make sure that your most important pages are easily found, above the fold on your web site home page and obviously labelled. The standard is to ensure that every important page is no more than two clicks away from your homepage. However, your primary products and services should be obviously and directly linked to from your home page. Take a step back, look at your site from the eyes of a potential client or visitor, is it completely and utterly obvious how to navigate your site without the need to use the search button?

The third key element to web sites that work is online marketing. You can have the best web site in the world, beautifully designed with the most logical and obvious navigational system available but if no one visits, what is the point. Online marketing isn’t just getting your on site seo factors right or building links from contextually relevant sites, it is much more than that. You need to have a plan, both for seo and Social Media marketing. Have your keywords thoroughly researched and find your rankings at the starting point, there is no point in marketing unless you know where you are and where you want to go to. Make sure that you use Social Media such as Twitter and Facebook, these tools can build your site natural links that seo often fails to do.

Finally, branding is a key element to any business success. Don’t forget your brand and make sure that you protect your brand using legal means. Building up a great web site, design and navigation only to have your brand hijacked because your didn’t protect it is madness. Get your brand noticed, get a brand that works and is functional and related to your business. We are Gold Coast Media because the modern name for our area in North Devon is the Gold Coast, great beaches with fantastic surf. We love to surf both the web and the waves, it attracts like minded modern clients to us and it isn’t a boring generic name – well we don’t think so anyway!

Your hosts file is just a normal text file. To open it, you will need to determine where it is as the location differs depending on the operating system you use. Take a look at the table below to find out where your hosts file resides on your hard drive.

Once you know where you hosts file is located you can open it with a text editor like Notepad or gEdit. Note that you might need to open it with administrator privileges to be able to both open and write to the file.

If you have been asked to add something to your hosts file add it on a new line to the bottom.

11.222.33.444 www.somewebsite.co.uk

If you are asked to add a line similar to the above add it on a new line at the bottom of the hosts file and save. What this does is assign the website hostname www.somewebsite.co.uk to a specific IP address. This allows you to go to www.somewebsite.co.uk in your browser and for it to use the IP instead of looking it up like everyone else.

Once the new hosts entry has been added open up your web browser and go to the website listed on the new entry. If you don’t notice any changes you might need to restart your computer (or clear your DNS cache).