Many companies will offer you a “free” domain as long as you keep using their services. We do not do that as quite simply your domain name is the single most important online asset you have and you should maintain direct control over it. I generally keep my domains and hosting with different people, but I always keep the domains unbundled. It costs less than £3 per year for your domain, so it seems like a small price to pay for this security.

Now before I go on, I must point out that most companies that bundle a domain name in with are perfectly legitimate and will let you take control of your domain name should you want to move. However there are other issues as unless you can replicate the site exactly, this will cause you issues.

OK, I am going to get a little technical here as it helps to understand why your domain name is important and why your site layout is important too, so if you are a little techno-phobic, you can simply skip through to the bit at the end when I explain what to do and ignore the whats, wheres and whyfores. Don’t worry, I will make it very clear where this bit ends so you can skip past if feel narcoleptic at the thought of it….if you do embark on reading it, I’d make a cup of tea before you start!

OK, got your cup of tea? Good, let’s begin….Google’s algorithm uses several measures to determine where to rank you, but essentially these fall into 2 main areas, what are termed on-site (sometimes called on-page) and off-site. The most famous part of the Google algorithm relates to the use of off-site metrics by way of links to your site, which is why we are concerned with keeping control of your domain name and the structure of your site.

Now, to explain how a link works I’ll need to explain the basics of a link. If you are familiar with this, feel free to skip this paragraph, but when someone links to your site it will look something like this Tulett.com are wonderful web designers. Within this are several elements, but the most important is the page that the link points to, in this case it is our home page. The next element is what is called the anchor text, which in this case is “Tulett.com are wonderful web designers” and this essentially tells you what the page is about.

So when Google finds one of these it takes it as a vote for the page it links to, but Google has realised that not all links are created equal.

Google looks at these to see where they came from (the authority and relevance of a page – so if you got a link from the main coaching body, it carries lots of weight as it is both relevant and important in the world of coaching, whereas a link from a brand new blog about cycling would carry very little weight) This is how Google knows that sites like Amazon have nothing to do with rainforests, but selling books etc. (As you can see from this, if you get a good link to your site, then change your domain name, you lose this recommendation. This should be part of any promotion strategy in future, which means that the domain name you promote becomes ever more valuable to you, so make sure you keep control of it!)

However smaller, newer sites will not have much information, so Google uses the information contained on the site itself, the on-site metrics. Since alicecoaching.co.uk has been around for a little while with content on coaching on it, Google already knows what this site is about and it has aged a little. As a secondary benefit, the main keyword groups you are going to be targeting (keywords are the words typed into Google to get a set of results) are coaching related, so having this in your domain name also helps (the words like “career” & “careers” will be associated far more with job sites, a big and popular market so targeting those will be harder and potentially less beneficial as not directly related to what you do – not a good combination!)

You may think I am being a little Google-centric about this, but what people type in tells you how they think about it and the words they use, hence allows you to use their language, making them more responsive to you as well as putting your site where they can find you. The classic example used is South West airlines in the US. They are a discount airline and for years they branded themselves as “inexpensive” and would not let any of their communications use words like “cheap”…this was until someone pointed out that the number of searches each month for “cheap flights” etc was in the tens of thousands and pretty much no-one typed in “inexpensive flights” and when their pages did show up, they got very poor click through rates – they changed policy and their online bookings rocketed.

There are countless other examples of this, but I find it is very useful to go through this and target each page to a set group of keywords as you know this is what people are looking for and if you offer it, you want to make sure they know about it! It also gives a good indication on how to set up your site, but I will go into this more later…I bet you cannot wait!

So what are these link things and why do we keep banging on about links and how important they are?

Well you probably already know that a link is the bit you click on to navigate around the web and find your way to other sites. You will probably have noticed that we have mentioned that getting links to your site is important, but not be quite sure why.

Well in the same way that links let you find your way around the web, they are also the way that Google finds it’s way around the web to see what is out there. Google sends these little programs called Google-bots out onto the web and they simply follow every single link they can (or are allowed to) navigate. This tells Google what is out there, but this is only half the story – now Google knows what is out there, how do they know where to put it in the search results and what content is the best and deserves to go at the top of the results?

To achieve this Google’s algorithm uses several measures to determine where to rank you, but essentially these fall into two broad areas; On-Site (or On-Page for the specific page) and Off-Site.

On-Site is the actual stuff you put on your website; the words, images, and how you connect it all together, which we cover elsewhere. The most famous part of the Google algorithm relates to the use of off-site metrics by way of links to your site from other sites on the web.

Now, to explain why this is important I need to briefly explain how a link works. If you are familiar with this, feel free to skip this paragraph, but when someone links to your site it will look something like this Tulett.com are wonderful web designers. Within this are several elements, but the most important are the page that the link points to, in this case it is our home page, and what is called the anchor text, which in this case is “Tulett.com are wonderful web designers”. Between them it tells you where to go to and what the page being linked to is about.

So when Google finds a link to another site it takes it as a vote for the page it links to, as the site must have put it there because it liked the content it being linked to. However Google has realised that not all links are created equal.

Google looks at the link to see what the anchor text says and how relevant the page it is on is to the page being linked to. In addition, Google looks to see how many people link to the page with the link on, how established it is etc. and in turn how relevant those pages are etc. When Google adds all these various pieces of data together it can work out how strong the vote for your site is.

So let’s say that you are a school football coach in Bristol and you got a link from FIFA.org or a big coaching body containing the anchor text “Joe Bloggs coaches football at St Anywhere School in Bristol”. This link carries lots of weight as it is both relevant and from an important site in the world of football. Even better it contains anchor text that is strongly related to you and your site, so this is going to propel you up the search rankings.

On the other hand, lets say that someone made a mistake and misspelled the domain name in the link and accidentally linked to you from a brand new site about flower arranging with anchor text “petunias arranged as a giraffe” then this would carry very little weight as the site is new and has little authority and is not relevant.

Naturally the links you get to your site will usually fall in between these extremes, but this is how Google knows that sites like Amazon have nothing to do with Brazilian rainforests, but selling books etc. As you can see from this, if you get a good link to your site, then change your domain name, you effectively lose this recommendation and any others that point to your site.

Additionally if your site structure changes and the page that the link points to is not longer there, Google or anyone else following the link will be presented with “404 – Page Not Found” which is not what you want either as users will be annoyed and Google will realise the page is not relevant to the link…not good!

Since getting these links should be part of any promotion strategy for your site, it means that the domain name you promote becomes ever more valuable to you, so make sure you keep control of it!

Additionally, you need to be sure that the structure for your site is right from the outset or will not affect the URL (the URL is link to the specific page on a site, for example the one for this page is http://tulett.com/what-are-links-why-important)

The Folkestone Literary Society are a local literary society than sponsors the Folkestone Book Festival and runs several community projects, book groups etc.

The aim was to create a simple site, with a fairly rigid structure that a group of retirees could run and update. Stylistically the site was given a literary flavour, loosely based on the style of The Guardian website, a favourite of the people at FLITS.

Most people are used to thinking about content in the form of either a brochure or a presentation. While these do share some elements with structuring a website, there are some key differences.

Firstly, with a presentation or brochure, there is a definite beginning, middle and end. You also know why people are reading your brochure or attending your presentation. On the web, your user may have come to you via Google or another search engine, which means there is a very good chance they have not arrived at your home page. With this in mind, how do you take them through your site to give them the information they need and encourage them to buy your products, call you up, listen to your music or any other goal you have in mind for them?

OK, you know what you want from your website and you know that you want to show up in search engines to get business to come to you. But how do you do this and get the best return on your effort?

Before we start, you should be aware that this is not an exact science, so all we can do is make a best guess. It is also quite dull and laborious, but luckily it only needs to be done in full once, but it is worth it.

Most sites, especially small ones, do not put much thought into their site structure or know what it is they are targetting. So this upfront work can lead to huge benefits for your site and business compared to your competitors and will also give you a pretty good over-view of how your site needs to be structured.

Keyword Volume

Surely the easy solution is to find out which keywords get the most people searching for them and simply go after that term? Well not always, just because a search term is popular is it really going to help your site? For example if you are an electrician based in York is it really going to be useful to try to rank for the word “electrician”?

Keyword Research

OK, so that is pretty obvious, you do not want to rank for “elephant safari” if you sell children’s clothing. But now consider the case with two similar keywords, like “kids clothing” and “childrens clothing” in which “kids clothing” gets many more searches than “childrens clothing”. With two similar keywords like this, surely you would simply go for the most searched? Rather predictably this is not necessarily true either as everyone else wants to do the same thing. So generally the more searches a keyword, the harder it gets to get your site shown on the first page of Google’s results pages.

Furthermore there are certain keywords that are more valuable as the products are very valuable to the providers of the services such as credit cards or certain prescription drugs (and you know which ones I am talking about!) So keywords like “credit cards” or “cheap flights”, which are both often searched for and worth a lot of money to the people with the websites that rank well, are going to be the toughest.

You can probably guess from this that as you are not one of the large players, getting on the first page of Google for a term like this is not really feasible. However this is not always a bad thing, consider the times when some types “electrician” into Google. Are they looking for an electrician to work on their house, a contractor for a warehouse being built, courses to become an electrician, a national body for the regulation of electricians? Quite simply you do not know, so if you spend a lot of time trying to rank for very generic terms like this, much of your effort will be wasted as your site will show up in the wrong searches.

Prioritise Keywords

So we need to work out which keywords are going to work for your site and then determine which keywords are going to give the best trade-off between the number of searches and the difficulty to get them into the search results. Luckily for us there are some very good (and free!) tools we can use to help with this. These tools will give us the number of searches for a given keyword term, but also other potentially related keywords and the number of people that searched for those terms.

This means we can easily take you want to offer on your site and map this to what people type into the search engines when they are looking for your products or services. Quite simply we try any keywords we think are relevant to your site, note the amount of searches in a spreadsheet.

We then go a step further and note down the others that come up that we think are also relevant and group them. For example, if you sell t-shirts, they it may break down into categories such as “funny t-shirts”, “music t-shirts” etc. which will form groups of the similar keywords like “funny tshirts”, “funny tees” etc.

For each of these terms we put them in and get more relevant terms, which we group and break them down further into sub groups. So music t-shirts may break down into genres and bands, which in turn breaks down into “Rolling Stones t-shirts” or “U2 t-shirts”, which may break down further to “Zooropa t-shirts” or “Bono t-shirts” and so on.

This is also where you can discover things that you are missing or could offer as there is a market for them, for example if you do not do a Coldplay shirt, but people search for them a lot, it is something to put on the to-do list!

Keyword Ranking

Once you have gone through this and exhausted all your keywords you will have a good idea of what is being searched for by your potential visitors. Now it is time to go through and rank them according to how relevant these keywords are to your site.

Again this does not need to be too complicated – simply throw out the ones that are not closely matched to your services or too generic to be useful, then rank the rest as either A, B or C, but with one proviso; you have as many of each so you cannot simply rank all of them as A!

For the last stage you need to get an idea about how hard it is to rank for a given keyword. Google actually works out how well each page ranks for a given keyword based on many criteria, including the content of the page and the number of links to the page, this is called the Page Rank (PR). Unfortunately for us, they do not tell you exactly how strong any page’s Page Rank is for a given keyword.

They do however give out what is now often termed the “Toolbar Page Rank” (TBPR). This is high level indicator of how strong a page is rather than an indicator for it’s strength for a given keyword and goes from 0 to 10 (only a few sites like the Google homepage manage this) There is also an unranked category, usually only given to new pages. So although not perfect, it does give us something we can use to work out approximately how strong the competition is.

To further aid us, we can also look at some key information we know Google uses to determine how relevant a page is to a given keyword – the domain name, the title and content of a page.

So to get this information, the first thing you need to do is get the SEO tools that display this information and install them.This will give you the TBPR information in the Google Search Results.

Now put each keyword into Google and see what comes up on the first page. The top result is the one that Google thinks is the most relevant, the last on the page is what Google considers the tenth most relevant. This may change from day to day, but we are only looking to get an idea of the competition so this is fine. Now look at each of the ten results in turn and see if the keyword is highlighted exactly as you entered it into Google (word order is the same etc) in the title and the snippet that Google shows for each entry on the first page.

If it is, then that page’s PR for the keyword is likely to be roughly the same as it’s TBPR. If the keyword appears, but the word order is different, then you can drop the TBPR a little. If a similar phrase appears in the title and the snippet, then the page’s actual PR for the keyword phrase is likely to be lower again than the TBPR.

Structuring a website is something most people give very little thought to. However with our help and some free online tools, you can create a site that both helps your users find what they are looking for and be liked by the search engines, getting you the results you want.

The first question is, is your site talking the same language as your customers and users? There is an often used story of a discount airline that for years insisted that they were not “cheap” they were “inexpensive” and anything issued by the company had to use the word “inexpensive” – press releases, advertising, web site, absolutely everything.

As the web became more important they were falling behind some of their rivals, especially on-line, so they hired some consultants to ask them why this was happening. Now the answer looks obvious now, but there was a large amount of resistance to changing the use of the word “inexpensive” to “cheap” as they had spent millions branding themselves as the “inexpensive airline”. They thought that this was great, until it was shown how many more millions they were losing to their competitors by having them appear above them for the hugely popular search terms like “cheap flights”. They discovered how expensive being inexpensive was!

This is an extreme example (and why it gets cited so often) but it goes to show that unless you are careful you can target your website to something that your customers just aren’t looking for.

So you need to make sure that the language on your site is the same as the language your visitors use. But where do you get this information from and how do you use it to target your site. For example, do you know if more people type the words “kids clothing” or “childrens clothing” into Google?

The actual answer is that people using Google in the UK type the words “kids clothing” almost twice as often as “childrens clothing”, which may be surprising, it certainly was to one of our clients! They were even more amazed to discover that “kids clothes” was typed in almost three times more than “kids clothing”.

Now you may think that it really does not matter as “kids clothing” and “childrens clothing” mean the same thing, however if you put those into Google you get very different results. For example, sites like Debenhams turn up in both sets of results, but in very different positions, others only appear in one set of results, so the search engines obviously look for something different even for similar keywords.

These phrases that are typed into the search engines are called “keywords” and we use these to help derive a structure for your site. We do this by finding out something about what you do in your own words and use this to research the keywords that people use to find services and products like yours.

Many of our clients have found this process very helpful from a business point of view as well as it forces you to focus on exactly what it is your business does and how you do it. With one client it even uncovered an unexploited area that has since become one of their most called on services and also helps you determine what needs to be written and how to write it too.

Most people already have a logo and some idea of how they would like their site to look, our job is to take these ideas and create a site that does them justice.

Inspiration

You may have a very clear idea of exactly how you want your site to look, or you may be less clear. To find out where you ware we will talk to you to discover what your thoughts on how your site needs to look.

After talking to you, the next step is for you to send anything through that you would like to use, for example your logos, your band’s CD covers, images you have, point us to any sites you like (even if it is only for small elements) images you like the style of, anything in fact that will convey what you want the site to be. Alongside this, tell us why you like them; is it the colour scheme, the fonts, or just that indefinable feel? This will give us an idea of where to go with our initial designs.

Initial Site Design

We will then go away and come up with an initial design on our development servers. At this stage there will be no real content on the site, we will simply use dummy data even if you have an existing site or content written. The reason for this is that we will be working on the site structure alongside the visual design and we have found the best way to do this is to isolate the two streams. For this reason we will present only the visual elements of the site initially. Any text will be filled with gobbledegook to show how the pages will look when there is content there, but no actual to distract from the visuals.

Further Iterations

Now we will do our best to hit the mark first time and have you delighted and ready to sign off the design immediately. Unfortunately this is not always the case and we may not get what you are looking for immediately. The good thing is that this is simply the initial design and this is a collaborative and iterative process, so we will go through what you do like and what you do not like as we realise this is your site.

Leveraging Expertise

If we think you are making a mistake we will point this out to you and explain why. For example one of the most common pieces of initial feedback is for people to ask for their logo to be bigger. This is understandable as from your point of view the logo is very important and needs to be emphasised. However the users of your site know where they are and you only have a limited useful area on your site. If the logo takes up a large portion of the most prominent (and hence useful) screen space, you are severely limiting the amount of information you can display to your user before they have to start scrolling.

Take a look at how the big online brands like eBay and Amazon structure their pages; while the logo is prominent, it is small. Since the user will already know which site they are on and are now looking to find the information they need on your site, is this a good use of your screen space? You know that companies like Amazon and eBay have spent a large amount of money to determine how large their logos need to be to get their message across for the least amount of screen space, so are you sure that you want to go the opposite way?

This approach of not trying to reinvent the wheel is one we use widely. We spend a lot of time looking at how large, well established web sites display content and follow the research on how people use the web so we can bring our expertise to your site to gain the benefit of a large research budget for a far more modest outlay.

Bringing Everything Together

As we work with you on this and the overall site structure, we will bring the two together to show you the structure of the site overall. Once we have this, we can begin showing you how everything works behind the scenes so you can flesh out the site with all the information and see how easy and satisfying controlling your own site is.

Whatever your requirements we will take you through the process of getting your business onto the web with a beautiful website your customers will love. At Tulett.com we also believe that the quality of our designs and services are the things that should keep our customers with us, so we do not tie you in by using either bespoke software or holding your domain names.

Unlike many other website designers, we build all our sites on the hugely successful WordPress platform. By designing your site around our CMS package, you can edit your website whenever you need to.

Portfolio & Brochure Websites

Many businesses only require a simple on-line presence. For this purpose we offer a packages including self-editable pages, a gallery to showcase your work or products, a blog and submission to Google local. These packages that start from just £500.

Ecommerce Sites

Are you looking to get your products online? We will build you a fantastic site whether you are looking to sell a few t-shirts or a full online shop accepting payments via the web starting from £700.

Content Management Systems

All our sites are built to allow you to update your site as required, but you may have more complex needs. For example you may need to have an editor to approve content from a team of writers, or be able to add new categories and documents to your site. We have packages starting from £1200.

Band and Musician Websites

We have several website packages for bands and musicians, allowing your fans to see what you have been up to, where you are playing, hear your music buy your merchandise. We can even help in getting your music on iTunes and Amazon MP3 and get your t-shirts printed and delivered with no upfront costs. We have music website packages starting from £600.

Photography Websites

We have several website packages for photographers, allowing you to display your galleries and services, give your clients their own private galleries and take payments online. Our photographic packages start from £500.

If you are interested in working with Tulett on your next web project, drop us a line…

At Tulett.com we also believe that the quality of our designs and services are the things that should keep our customers with us, so we do not tie you in by using either bespoke software or holding your domain name.

An advantage of building on free, open source platforms like WordPress means that there is a wide choice with where to host your site. At Tulett.com we naturally offer combined hosting and support packages to ensure your site remains running and up to date, however we will never tie you to us and these packages are optional. In fact we are more than happy to design the site, help you find appropriate hosting and get it up and running there. This service costs a small one off fee as it takes more work for us to do this than host it on our own servers, so rather than penalise the customers we have on our servers we charge a fee.

The last thing that we feel differentiates Tulett.com from other website designers is that we do not hold your domain name. Your domain name is a key part of your business, band or personal identity, however many agencies register it “on your behalf”. In reality this means that they own your domain, making it very hard to leave. We will never register your domain, in fact we insist that you register your domain to ensure you never feel tied to us or our services.

Tulett.com always design and set up our sites to ensure that your site’s pages are optimised to give it the best chance to appear in the right place in the search engine results too. As part of our design process, we discuss your site requirements not only in terms of the way you want it to look, but also what the site should focus on.

For example South Western Airlines in the US were one of the first discount airlines. For many years they insisted that all their literature should describe them as “inexpensive”, never “cheap”. However nobody ever looks for “inexpensive air travel” they simply type “cheap flights” into their search engine. Once South Western had it pointed out to them how much business they were losing, they quickly amended their guidelines and proudly became “cheap”!

These phrases that get typed into the search engines are termed “keywords” in the web design world. Now unless you are an established discount airline or you have a wallet the size of an Oligarch and the patience of a saint, you are unlikely to rank at number one a popular keyword like “cheap flights” regardless of what you do. However ranking at number one for a phrase that nobody ever types is also pointless, so the trick is to find a balance. Our clever SEO people here at Tulett.com will help you determine which keywords are the most appropriate for your site based on the number of people that type in the keyword against the competitiveness of that keyword.

So Tulett.com will ensure that your site not only looks good, but also functions well from both a user administrative side and will be liked by Google, Bing and Yahoo.