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Why invest your web design and advertising budget on a product that will not produce results?

Call DMA today to receive a competitive estimate for your online presence.

While Google Adwords can be affordable for many industries, pay per click advertising is becoming very competitive and in some cases very expensive. A good example of a highly competitive industry is web design and SEO. Our competitors are fighting hand over fist for top positions in both paid and organic results in Google. There is more than one way to skin a cat though, and as many of our clients have discovered we help small to medium businesses prosper from intelligent web strategies that are affordable. For more information drop us an email and we’ll endeavour to provide your company with an online solution that suits your needs.

The main difference with the new search results is that the Google Places results look very similar to normal organic results. Previously the Google Maps listings appeared with limited information, which encouraged users to scroll down the page to the organic results. Effectively position one in the search results will be as low as position six to nine depending on how the results are served up.

As seen in these results position one is more important then ever before. Currently position one and two are sometimes above the Google Places results, which places even more importance on SEO.

While these changes favour local businesses who have a website but are not well optimised, those websites with a good online presence, who offer a professionally designed and effective website will prosper.

In recent times Google’s Webmaster Tools has offered additional “search queries” data which provides valuable information about your website. Features include the following.

• The top keywords or phrases that your website appears for
• The number of impressions these keywords or phrases receive
• The clicks your website receives for these keywords or phases
• The Click through rate for these keywords or phrases
• The average position where your website rank for keywords or phrases

Google Adds “Change” Column

While the current enhancements were a great addition to Webmaster Tools, in a further improvement Google has added a “change” column. As seen below this extra information shows rises or falls in each category.

This new data enables webmasters to monitor trends in rankings, click through rates and keywords searches and impression. Each column can also be sorted by clicking the heading.

As a free tool that is available to any Webmaster, these new features will ensure Google remains as the benchmark in the analytics market.

It has been suggested this new feature will provide a faster search tool, however Google already delivers immediate results. While this function isn’t available in Australia (Google.com.au) it will no doubt reach our shores. The jury is still out on what is yet another tweak to what seemed to be the perfect search engine. Many industry experts have described it as a distraction and even a deterrent from using Google and some even suggesting Bing.com could be the beneficiary of more search traffic. One of the most common complaints about Google Instant is that it delivers irrelevant results, possibly confusing the user in many situations.

Here are some tips for choosing a good website name.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is an essential part of all search engine optimisation campaigns, however choosing the correct keyword for your domain name can offer a huge advantage over your competition. Establishing the terms relating to your products and services, which are typed into the search engines the most, is the first step in finding the right domain name. Care must be taken into deciding which keyword should be used, as some keywords may not be suitable from a branding point of view. In the end choosing a domain name is a one-time decision and therefore must not be taken lightly.

Domain Name Extension

The second most important factor, which will influence the effectiveness of your domain, comes down to the domain name extension. In Australia the major search engine is google.com.au with over 85% of the search market. First choice for google.com.au would be the .com.au extension followed by the .com. Surprisingly the .net.au’s tend to perform poorly and even .net and .org’s seem to outperform .net.au’s. Without a doubt a .com.au will provide a huge boost in the rankings for exact match keyword domain names.

Make it User Friendly

Unique names can be beneficial, such as “google”, “bing”, “youtube”, “facebook” and the list goes on, but all of these sites are backed by something unique or are outstanding at what they do (or are free services). We recommend not going down this track but to be creative with your keywords and come up with a memorable name that will stick in people’s minds. Try to stay away from unusually long domain names and avoid hyphens and numerals, although they may make your name more readable. Also make sure the name will accurately identify what your core business products and services are. Although many search engine users will deny reading the domain name in the search results subconsciously most people will glance at the URL.

Summary

• Choose high volume exact match keyword if possible.
• Use .com.au to target Australian based users.
• Make it memorable.
• Keep it as short as possible.
• Don’t make up an obscure or unique name.

Directories

A fast way to get to the first page of the search engines is to join online directories such as True Local, Aussie Web, Yellow Pages Online, Home Improvement Pages and the list goes on. These websites usually ask for a monthly or yearly fee to appear in their directory and are often based on a “pay for position” model, therefore if you pay the most and you were the first to pay, then you will retain top positions.

Pay Per Click

Pay per click (PPC) is the fastest way to rank your website on top of the search engine results. The Google Adwords (PPC) framework can be finely tuned to allow only highly targeted traffic to visit your website. Geo targeting can also be achieved by nominating you local area, which excludes searchers from outside your area that would waste your clicks. If not handled properly PPC can be a siphon for advertising funds therefore a professional adwords reseller is highly recommended for first timers.

SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the Rolls Royce of online marketing. The beauty of SEO is that once you have achieved your rankings you do not have to pay for any clicks. Unfortunately SEO requires many hours of marketing research, years of experience in online marketing and the ability to provide a complete online solution for your business. It can be costly to initially setup but with a small amount of ongoing work, in the long term it is the most cost effective means of ranking in the search engines.

If you are a tradesman and want to explore the possibilities of online marketing, contact our office to find out more about selling your services online.

This up selling is in keeping with Yellow Pages past tactics with their print publications. Starting with quarter page ads, then introducing half page and finally releasing full page ads at 4 times the price, consequently forcing advertisers to upgrade to stay ahead of the competition. Continued increased ad sizes has meant advertisers have needed to increase advertising to prevent being leapfrogged by the lower placed advertisers. Whilst “Purely Mobile Business” is not currently available in all classifications we will continue to monitor the developments of Yellow’s latest premium products to provide an insight into how these changes will affect your small business website.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content can be either on one website or across multiple domains throughout the Internet, therefore developing unique content becomes a critical aspect of all website designs. When designing a website it is imperative that the content is written in such a way that “we decide” what will be displayed in the search engines rather than relying on the algorithms to decide for us. Stolen or scraped content is also a sure way to be excluded from the search results.

Besides written content, technical issues can create duplicate content problems as well. Websites can be displayed in many ways and the search engines can pick these up as duplicate content, consequently hindering of SEO efforts. The following versions are common ways in which domains are displayed. These are all classified as different pages and are important to clarify these duplicate content problems with the search engines by redirecting each page to the appropriate page.

http://www.yourdomain.com

http://yourdomain.com

http://www.yourdomain.com/

http://www.yourdomain.com/index.html

Ultimately the power to rank pages in Google is in our hands if we follow guidelines set out by the search engines and create a unique website that adds value to the search results.