E-book - The Secrets to Success on the Web - Instalment 1/4

Introduction

Mark Snare is a successful entrepreneur and gives his time as a mentor through Dorset Business Mentors’ program. When business owners approach us, either for personal or role mentoring within their business, we carefully assess the requirement and who of our mentors could add the greatest value. At the top level Mark is considered for business at all stages but most particularly that are fledgling start-ups, those looking to grow where e-commerce is a significant factor, and those who are considering exit options. His particular expertise is in marketing and trends, optimised use of the internet, common pitfalls as well as developing resilience and strategy. He is currently supporting two businesses and you can read one of two testimonials here, as well as Mark’s perspective here. As you will discover this business centres around e-commerce and his expertise and support is proving very effective in contributing to their growth.

Mark has kindly agreed to share his brilliant e-book which summarises and contains all you need to know about achieving success on the web. It is a digestible, layman’s terms must-read for any business with a web presence (which of course is most) who wants to optimise its contribution to growth, and gives essential guidance to any reader who is about to rush off to an agency with a ‘budget’ and no brief. If you expect a return on your investment, what follows is essential reading.  

We are publishing this e-book in weekly sections, beginning with Chapters 1 & 2. If you would like notification of the next instalment, please follow us on Twitter or Facebook. If you would like support as you seek to grow YOUR business, then please tour this website or pick up the phone, and request a mentor. We then contact you for an informal, confidential, no-obligation chat to assess your need and explain the process to helping you on your journey to fulfilling your ambitions as a successful entrepreneur.

Author Mark Snare 

Contents

1        Choosing your speciality*

2        Choosing your platform*

3        Making data based decisions*

4        Launching micro sites, blogs and videos

5        Links

6        SEO on page

7        Paying for traffic

8        Going multi-channel

9        Free things you should do

 *In this instalment

Let me start by telling you a bit about me. After a career in marine engineering I moved to London via Australia to try city life. After several attempts at various careers I found self employment calling me again. This was 2005 and the internet was well on it's way to taking over. I built a website that complemented my marine engineering business back in the late 90's but now wanted all in to the internet, so I created an e-commerce business centred around healthy living equipment, a niche I was passionate about. This business took off and completely transformed my life and made me a life long fan of technology. I've learned much of what is in this book by trial and error, and hope by reading this you can streamline your own efforts and avoid some of the pitfalls and setbacks I experienced on the learning curve.

Is it easy or risk free? No, but if I can do it, so can you. Better still, you can turn your interests and passions into profitable businesses with flexible working hours allowing you to live life more on your terms.

If that sounds like something you would like to do, read on, I'll tell you everything I know.

CHAPTER ONE

Specialising: Choose your topic and your URL

Let’s face facts. To make your mark on the internet you either need to be the size of amazon and do it all or carve out a niche as a specialist supplier gearing everything you do towards surfacing through the background noise of the almost infinite web!

If you choose your specialisation, you can build the authority of yourself as an expert and your site and surround social media output and stand a chance of appearing in the search engine results that will feed you traffic and sales. There are several short cuts to getting traffic and making sales that I will share with you later, but long term if you become THE specialist in your niche, you will create value, and that is what it’s all about!

If your efforts are too generalised you will probably be drowned out in search results as the search engines will simply not recognise your site’s area of expertise. The major search engine’s technology is now so advanced that to feature in SERPs (search engine results pages) your site must be considered a leading authority on the topic it represents. This is not to say you can’t launch multiple websites each with their area of focus, in fact doing just that will make it easier to find quality traffic than one un-focussed website that is hard to understand and pigeon hole.

The first job to do when setting up a website of any type is to buy the website URL, people do this badly and cause themselves workloads of unbelievable proportions trying to make the site visible. Let me give you an example.

Let’s say you decide to set up an e-commerce website and your chosen specialisation is drawer and cupboard handles. Very specialised, quite a niche: this is a good idea, a strong start. Now let’s think about the URL, the address that the site will sit on. If you read the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) press there are conflicting reports on the importance of what follows, but in my experience and particularly when launching product specific micro sites (more about this later) this part is vital. The typical decision people make is to choose a brand, say “Grosvenor Designer Hardware” then go and buy www.grosvenor-designer-hardware.co.uk or worse still a URL like www.grosvenordesignerhardware.com

These choices may bolster “brand awareness” (whatever that is) or fly the company flag, but they won’t help people find your site for what it is you offer. When you first start, no one is searching for your company name, people are, however searching for cupboard handles and drawer handles so aim for those search terms when you buy your URL.

It is much better to buy a functional URL that will drive traffic based on the search terms you need to be found for so think more along the lines of:

www.drawer-and-cupboard-handles.co.uk

www.drawer-and-cupboard-handles-online.co.uk

www.quality-handles-for-cupboards.com

www.best-drawer-handles.co.uk

Although these URLs seem clunky or not very catchy they will help your SEO efforts no end. I have got some URLs right and some wrong over the years and I know which sites have hit rankings, traffic and sales. By having search keywords in your URL you achieve two things, the obvious one is search engines scanning those money-generating search terms in the top line of your website, the URL or web address. And two, people linking back to your site may use anchor text OR they’ll just use your URL. Tune your URL choice for traffic generation. Traffic is profit.

Buying the URL is the FIRST thing you do, get it wrong and at best you’ll triple the amount of time you spend on your SEO (search engine optimisation) efforts, at worst your business will fail. It is THAT important and it takes 2 minutes. Great if you know, positively chilling if you don’t.

Surf the net and search for some products, say guitar strings you’ll see amazon, eBay, expensive AdWords listings, all the big hitters, then specialised sites probably with “guitar” and “strings” in their URL. Wise choice of URL, follow that model.

This is also why some web real estate is so valuable, like www.skateboards.com for example. The buying and selling of prime addresses happen like attractive number plates for cars. Another topic in itself.

CHAPTER TWO 

Choosing your platform

This has been one of the most astonishing and concerning areas of website building. Do not take anything for granted when talking to web design firms and don’t be afraid to ask what may seem like really basic questions.

For a website to be truly effective, all aspects must be optimised towards search engine performance or you will be facing an uphill struggle to get noticed. Trust me when I say that achieving and maintaining good search engine positions will take a good proportion of your time, don’t pull the rug out from under yourself by building a site that will be a battle to optimise.

So here are my favourite SEO orientated questions to ask your web designer if you use an e-commerce platform or other type of content management system:

Can alt tags be individually edited? (Alt tags describe each image and are important for search engines to identify the image and for people with impaired sight to access your website). We fell foul of expensive systems without this basic function.

Can you access the full suite of page meta data to edit it for SEO purposes, this means page title, description and keywords?  Although keywords are less relevant these days as some search engines ignore them. But it still indicates the level of customisation or control that you will have over your site. Some C.M.S. platforms will generate page title and description for you which can be hit and miss depending on where it draws the information from.

Can you add and edit H1, H2, H3 and H4 content? With most platforms this is easy, in the HTML editor area that allows you to add text there will be the ability to turn normal text into H1, 2, 3, 4 headers. This can be descriptive and give the search engines more idea of what your webpage it about. Remember you want your homepage to rank for your area of specialisation your internal pages get you even more high quality traffic by ranking for your specific products or services. If someone is looking for a ‘chrome plated round drawer handle” it will be useful if your page or department filled with chrome plated round drawer handles pops up first on a search engine.

Is there the ability to add “rich snippets” to the page, rich snippets are another way of giving search engines nice descriptive information about the specific webpage. This again adds to your SEO efforts and needs to be edited by you, rather than generated by the platform (this can lead to poorly constructed information).

Open source blogging platform WordPress has this feature, so why wouldn’t your platform?

Does your platform create a fully responsive website that will display on mobile, tablet and desktop? This question is vital, more and more search traffic comes through mobile devices and I can’t see that trend changing any time soon. Who knows, as hardware gets better the very notion of a desktop PC may well go extinct. The search engines look for sites that have either mobile versions or are fully responsive and will adjust to the screen size they are being viewed on automatically. Your new site needs to do this!

Will you host the site on a secure server? If you are going into e-commerce, launch the site on a secure server from the start. This means your URL will start “https” not “http” the engines will read that and prefer your website to non-secure competitors as it indicates you take your customer’s security seriously.

Do you see that good SEO and website building is a cake of many ingredients!

How neat is the code? Straight forward bad code is a common problem, ask your web site designer or platform supplier for examples of live websites that already use their content management or e-commerce systems. Check the page load speeds by searching on “page load speed checker” and feeding the homepage into the checker. This is a great way of showing whose sites are well coded and throwing up the fewest errors. Again the search engines take this data into account, can you image investing hundreds of hours writing content and buffing images for a CMS that runs slowly and will never please the search engines criteria?

There are so many ways to hamper your online efforts and doing a U turn on a website that is fundamentally flawed is painful and expensive. I think it probably happens every day though! Don’t be one of these unfortunate people.

Will my website have social media links, two things here, obviously the site’s very template MUST have links out to your businesses’ Facebook page, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, vimeo, twitter and any other social media outlet you plan on using. But will the individual product pages have “like” “tweet” and “share” buttons? Increasingly, social media use is part of search engine results if you content is being shared it must be relevant and of interest to people. That is as simple as that. A share is like a vote, “come and have a look at what I found” is what the sharer is saying. Make sharing your content easy to do, this is SEO that will happen while you sleep.

Does the offering use frames? Old one this, just don’t, frames can lock valuable content away from search engines and leave them staring at a blank space. Make SURE this doesn’t happen to you.

Can I embed video content in a slick and seamless way? Some platforms I have used really didn’t offer this. Videos show and speak to people in a way that text and pictures just cannot. So use video and make sure your platform can serve up video content in a way that does not look like a clumsy after thought.

Does your platform generate a site map file that can be uploaded to the various search engines to update them on the site? This isn’t optional, you need to tell the engines about your site and that is what a site map does.

Does your e-commerce section generate a merchant feed that will allow your products to show up on shopping channels offered by search engines?

Can your e-commerce platform run eBay, amazon, Tesco, Debenhams and other channels allowing you to simply integrate selling through third party sites as easily and neatly as selling through your own site?

Which accounting software packages will your e-commerce platform link to save on administration time?

Is there an easy way of keeping content fresh? A website is never done and never finished. Content must be kept fresh and new content added continuously, this tells engines that the site is alive and kicking and that someone is taking an interest in it. A blog is the easiest way to add fresh content while internal pages should be checked and updated frequently. Most web designers should be able to install a blogging platform like Wordpress seamlessly onto your server so adding fresh content is a cinch.

Also your blogging is a great way of capturing more free traffic with well named and SEO optimised blog posts. People are searching for information on everything, so say your area is refurbishing old furniture, if they read your post they will feel connected with your business and may come back to buy their new drawer handles from you. Think of blog posts as little advertising billboards floating round the internet bringing high quality traffic to your site.

Is the platform open source? How do updates happen? Who is going to host the site and where? Some agencies insist on hosting the site themselves which can lead to a rather turbulent relationship if prices creep up or performance falls down. I had this exact experience of a shiny new website falling further and further behind as the company hosting it would not update their platform and keep up with the times. If a web agency is successful you can be drawn to them, then that very success becomes the problem as they get comfortable and don’t press ahead with every possible tweak and update to keep their platform current.

Or suddenly every update that would be free on open source software comes with a hefty price tag. In my experience that agency only really took notice when customers started leaving them in droves. But by then it is too late. From that experience I would choose an independent agency on an open source e-commerce platform every time. People change, businesses change, try not to tie yourself to one supplier, it is not a safe long term strategy. Say you use Magento for example, you buy the hosting yourself and get a web design agency to make it unique, you will get continual platform updates and you can offer jobs to another agency if the first choice goes bust or out of date. Years down the line you’ll be glad of the redundancy and flexibility in that strategy.

Can you imagine your homepage slipping further and further down the SERPs simply because of out of date code or some other SEO limitation? The internet changes fast and to stay on top you need the flexibility that independence brings.

Will the template included links to my major brands and department pages, this is a simple way of making sure that your internal link strategy remains healthy. Steer the design towards a template with plenty of room for text. Two reasons here, search engines like text and text means links so each page that the template is on will link to prominent internal pages keeping them searchable and easy to find.

Here is a quick check list, try and launch a new website especially an e-commerce website on an open source platform like Magento with hosting that you pay for directly with the look or template created by a designer that you’re not tied to. This way you won’t be over charged for hosting, you’re not tied to any one web design firm and the platform will stay up to date as there is a whole develop community working on it constantly offering updates and plug-ins that keep things modern. Beware of anything less than this set up!