A static website goes “stale” quickly – a stale website hurts your companies image and can frustrate your customers. A CMS allows you or one of your staff to easily keep your image up to date on your website – no more calls and costs going to your web designer to do the smallest changes.

Online Business Functionality

If you need new functionality for your website, or you want to put your business functions online, paying a programmer to write a custom application is insanely expensive – not so with a CMS. Ask me how you can get your businesses functionality online for a lot less than you might imagine.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Stale websites don’t get as much attention as dynamic ones – other websites won’t link to you as much. Having a CMS gives you the opportunity to grow your audience and grow your inbound links – which are the king to increasing your page rank in search engines. I optimize all my clients CMS’s for SEO.

Maintenance Cost

When your 5 year old website needs a new look, you have to spend thousands of dollars for that new face-lift, and do it all over again every couple of years – not so with a CMS. This is one great way to “future-proof” your website investment and keep your maintenance costs down while keeping your website looking fresh and modern.

A Publishing Framework

If you want your website to be a great source of information and you want to become an authority in your area of business, you need to “grow” your website by publishing content to it. A CMS is a web publishing framework that allows you or your staff to grow your website with up-to-date content, thereby keeping your internet audience up to speed with the changes at your business.

Summary

Most businesses should use a CMS for their website. If you want to learn more about a CMS for your business, contact me to discuss whether a CMS website is the right choice for you!

…

This article is intended for people writing copy for their website – writing for the web has it’s own set of rules if you are trying to optimise your website for search engines.

Why it matters

Having a great looking website will make you feel good – but will your website be found by people doing a search on google.com?

Everyone knows that search engines are how people find products and services using the Internet – very few people are using the phone book for this purpose anymore.

Let’s use a simple example. Let’s say you are an architect, and most of your projects are in Brisbane, and you specialize in sustainable housing. Let’s assume most people looking for you will type "Brisbane sustainable architecture" into a search engine such as google. If your site has good SEO (search engine optimisation) your site would be on the first page of the search results. That could be worth a lot of business to you.

How can you get on the first page?

The answer to that question is a big one, and of course the competition for the first page can be fierce, but for this article I am going to focus on what you can do when writing copy for your website. A good web designer can handle the rest of the work when optimising your website.

A quick background on how search engines work

Search engines have automated programs that scan websites, this is how they figure out that you are a sustainable architect based in Brisbane. Search engines can’t "see" your site, instead they have to "read" it. This is why the words on your website are so important and must be focused around the central concept of your website’s purpose.

Figure out the words that best describe your websites central purpose

The words that best describe your websites central purpose are known as keywords. Do a google search for what you think your keywords are and see which sites come up. If they match your closest competitors, then right click on the page, and select "view source" now press Ctrl F and search forthe words just afterare the keywords your competition is using, they might give you a good idea about your keywords.

The keywords you decide on are (hopefully, with good research) the same keywords that people will type into a search engine, and your site will be found in the search because you worked those keywords into your copy in a structure way.

Let’s get back to our example:

We figured out that most people wanting your services will type "Brisbane sustainable architect" into a search engine. Those are your keywords. When you write copy for your website, you are writing an article. Your article must use your keywords in specific ways – you must put keywords into all these areas in your article:

1. The Title
2. The Heading(s)
3. The body

Don’t think of the title in the conventional way, because it is not going to visible to your readers (the heading will be). Your web designer puts the title is “inside” the webpage, and search engine’s are very interested in your title, so be sure to get all the keywords into your title. The title should be limited to 70 characters. Lets say our article is about why sustainable architecture means a healthier home. So the title for the Article should be something like "Brisbane Sustainable Architecture | Healthier Homes and Environment". I like to use the vertical bar in place of commas, it is a formatting convention in wide use for SEO.

Headings

Each article will naturally have headings – a main heading (H1) and typically subheadings (H2, H3, etc). We need to put our keywords in the headings and sub headings, most important of the headings is the first heading (H1). Here is an example of a H1 heading, which would be followed by the opening paragraph:

Why use a Sustainable Architect?

Taking our keywords into consideration, this would be a better H1 heading:

Why use a Brisbane based sustainable architect?

The latter heading is better because it used all of our main keywords. The most common mistake people make is to condense their titles and headings too much, and thereby leave out important keywords.

One important thing to realize about the Title – it is what is displayed on a search engine’s result page. There are actually three things that will be displayed on a search engine’s result page – the title, the description and the address of the web page found in the search.

At this point, regarding what is displayed on the search engine’s result page, you only need to be concerned with your title. I will worry about the other things. Just remember that all your articles (each web page) needs somewhat unique titles – search engines do not want to see the same title for all of your pages, this can actually hurt your ranking.

This means that your other article’s titles may introduce new keywords (besides your main keywords) but that is fine as long as those new keywords are central to what the article is about. But don’t forget to include your 3 main keywords into as many of your titles, headings, and article body’s as possible.

The body

The body will need to repeat your main keywords. We normally write copy without SEO in mind, and therefore we naturally do not repeat the keywords as often as we need to when writing for SEO. Try to get your keyword density at about 2 to 4 percent. To figure that out, just divide the occurrences of your keyword by the total number of words in the article.

Our example implies that having a location of Brisbane is important, so we need to include the word Brisbane in each article’s body. So an article that wasn’t optimised as well would have a sentence like "We create streamlined, elegant spaces connected strongly with their landscape context". And the better sentence adds the word Brisbane like this: "We create streamlined, elegant spaces in Brisbane connected strongly with their landscape context".

Summary

There are many facets to getting your website optimised for search engines. I will handle most of those details, but when you write the copy for your web pages, you have a major influence on your SEO. Writing web pages that are search engine optimized means we must first research and figure out what keywords most closely match your services or products and then include them in the title, headings and body in a structured way.

Visit the Alberta Street Acupuncture Clinic website.

Contact me to find out more about my web design services.

Your website needs multiple ways for your customer to take action – an easy way to send you an email, to join a newsletter, to sign up for your facebook page, to fill out a survey or to enter a chance to win something for free, to query a database of your products, these are all calls to action and are some of the most basic ways to interact with your web visitors. Ask me how easy it is for your website to interact with your customers!

The most important is to get on the internet and spend a few hours looking at what your competition is doing. Then write down what you do that is different and better than your competition, perhaps you offer services that they don’t. Also take note of things they are doing with their websites that gives them an edge – you may want to do something similar or it may give you some great ideas about how to leverage your website investment in ways none of your competition is doing.

Next is to find websites you really like, and write down the website address and what elements on each site you were attracted to and why. Example: www.widgets.com.au: I loved the white background and simplicity of the site, and it wasn’t busy or overwhelming – it was very easy to navigate the site using the menu of the right side of the page.

Next is to write down a list of adjectives that describe the feeling you want your website visitors to have upon viewing your site. Examples: I want my website to be warm, welcoming, relaxing, with vibrant colors that say “Good Morning Sunshine!”

For the websites you liked, take note of the main navigaton menu – that is how the information is organized across the site. Create your main navigaton menu on paper – this will start the process of what information you want to present and how you are planning on organizing it.

If you have any artwork, perhaps on your existing business cards or letter head, figure out if you want to use that on your website or if you need to create new artwork. Ideally, any artwork such as a logo you have should be used across all your marketing materials: website, business cards, stationary, invoices, etc.

Try to estimate what your website budget is, at least have a range that seems reasonable for you.

Lastly, ask your designer to educate you on how you can future-proof your website investment.

Not all web hosting providers are created equal, the main difference being varied levels of customer service, but most of the australian owned companies that have been around for at least 5 years under the same ownership offer reliable service and good customer service. Ask me how you can save hundreds of dollars per year!