Online Marketing Lessons
Lesson 1: Website Design, Development and Data
Lesson 2: Choosing the Best Phrases (Keyword Analysis)
Lesson 3: Implementing Changes
Lesson 4: Links – Building an Online Reputation
Lesson 1: Website Design, Development and Data
Welcome to our new Online Marketing Guide. The following lessons will help you turn your existing website into a fully operational marketing tool. Not only improving your website’s search engine visibility online, but building traffic to your website and converting visitors into customers.
The first stage is to check whether it is achievable with your current website and whether you should use your current website or develop a new website fit for purpose.
Although Search Engines are constantly changing, the overall principles remain the same: It’s all about providing searchers with the best possible, and most relevant, results so that they continue to use the Search Engines. Recently this has evolved, whereby the search engines are not only improving the results displayed but are also considering the users’ experience once they visit the website. This started off by concentrating on the amount of time users spent on the website, but has now become a lot more advanced. This is why the design, and structure, of a website is now very important.
Can you add the necessary codes to your website?
It is important that you can make the right changes to your website. There are quite a few important areas:
Title Tag:
<Title>Title Here</Title>
It is important that you can add or amend this on every page that you wish to optimise on your website.
Meta Description:
<meta name=”description” content=”Description here.“/>
It is important that you can add or amend this on every page that you wish to optimise on your website.
Meta Keywords:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”Keywords here.“/>
This is an item that used to be very important to search engines but isn’t anymore. However, although it is extremely doubtful it will be useful again, there isn’t any harm in adding this.
Heading Tags:
<H1>Main heading here</H1>, <H2>Sub Heading here</H2>, <H3>Sub Sub heading here</H3> etc.
It is important to include structure on the pages to let search engines and visitors understand the page better. A good way to do this is by using heading tags – in the same way that you would write a word document: A main heading for the page with different variations of sub headings.
Text on the Page:
Although search engines are improving on the way that they gather data from websites it is still important to have text on the page – the amount of text will depend on the competition however, websites should allow for as much text as possible and the ability for this to be broken up into different sections because you don’t want to just have a page of text.
Java Script:
<script type=”text/javascript”>script here</style>
Most websites nowadays have JavaScript, If possible the JavaScript should be placed in externalised files and placed near the bottom of the code on the page.
Cascading Style Sheet:
<style>Styles here</style>
Similar to JavaScript if possible as much css should be externalised and placed near the bottom of the code.
Image Alt and Title Tags:
<img src=”Image URL” width=”Size in pixels” height=”Size in pixels” alt=”Describe image here” title=”Describe image here” />
All images should have meaningful names so that search engines and people can see what the images are about. This will also be useful for image searches.
Canonical Tag:
<link rel=”canonical” href=”True URL” />
A canonical tag isn’t always needed. This is a tag that allows us to tell search engines that there is one page with multiple variations. For example: If the order of products on a page can be changed but this also changes the Page URL this could be seen as a duplicate page – however we can add a canonical tag to tell search engines that is isn’t.
Links:
<a href=”Full URL Here“>
All pages on your website will have links to other pages. When you add these links you should use the full URL rather than a relative one. This should be possible with your website. For example: Use <a href=”https://www.janklin.com/seo-services/“> and not <a href=”/seo-services/“>
Rich Snippets:
<div itemscope itemtype=”http://data-vocabulary.org/Organization” id=”contact-info”>
<p><span itemprop=”name”>Company Name</span></p>
<span itemprop=”address” itemscope itemtype=”http://data-vocabulary.org/Address”>
<p><span itemprop=”street-address”>Company Street Address</span>
<span itemprop=”locality”>Company City</span>, <span itemprop=”region”>Company County/State</span> Company Postcode/Zip</p></span>
</div>
Rich snippets will help explain your website better to search engines – they are not essential but should be possible with your website.
Website Structure, Design and Links
URL’s & Link Structure: https://www.yourdomain.com/meaningful-name
Url’s should all have good, short, meaningful names. This should be between 1 and 3 words where possible and not include variables. So this is good: https://www.janklin.com/seo-services/ and this is bad: https://www.janklin.com/index.php?id=12.
Website Structure
The website structure depends on the size of the website. Ideally your site pages should link to all of the other pages. However if your website is over 80 pages then this needs to be structured. This should be done with the most important pages linking from the homepage, then lesser important pages linking as you go deeper into the website. This is quite straightforward because normally main sections are more important than subsections and subsections are more important than products.
However there may be specific products or services so you should be able to link to anywhere from anywhere.
Overall you want to think of your visitors here. You should try to consider, both, where you want them to visit and where they themselves will want to visit – then make it easy to do both.
Responsive Design
Responsive Design is becoming increasingly important as technology advances. It’s necessary that when people visit your website they get the most from the experience – also Google is driving websites to be mobile friendly and the next step will probably be the provision of a fully responsive site.
We hope that you’ve enjoyed lesson 1 and hope you have enough information here to ensure you are ready to transform your website into an Online Marketing Resource.
If you need any help with any items above or are looking for a new responsive website feel free to call Jon on 01690 760328 or email on info@janklin.com if you have any questions.
