Sunday, March 20, 2011
Thursday, June 4, 2009
How do I use twitter for my business?
How do I use twitter for my business?
Twitter - twitter – twitter is all you hear about or for those of us who are new to twitter what is it all about? How should we use twitter? Is it all that it is cracked up to be? Should I be on twitter? And one of the most asked questions today: how do I use this in conjunction with my business?
Before we get into how to use twitter we need to understand what twitter is and how it works.
What is twitter?
Twitter is a micro blog to help you communicate with others either on the web or via mobile phones. Each message (or”tweet”) is limited to 140 characters. Think of twitter as short bursts of conversation either directed to an individual or as a group conversation.
The idea is to allow others on twitter to follow your conversation as you post each message, and allow them to add their own thoughts. Twitter calls these “followers”. Followers can be people on twitter whom you may or may not know and who find your topic of conversation interesting and want to contribute their experiences to it. It is important to understand that the comments can include positive or negative feed back.
How to use Twitter for my Business?
The recommended use of twitter for business is to use it as another communication channel for your existing customer base. This could be about the products and services you offer including updates, how to use, news, upcoming events etc that are important to your customer base. You may ask why as you already have many different ways for communicating with your clients. The advantages are the possibilities from others on twitter (followers) who may find the conversation interesting and informative therefore join the conversation or require your product or services.
Put simply, twitter is a form of word of mouth or networking, a place for discussion. This is important when you consider that one of the most powerful uses for the internet is for research on companies, individuals and the products and services they offer. Research shows that websites that allow customers to rate/discuss them and their products with positive and negative feedback actually improves sales and confidence because the balanced view makes it believable.
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Top 10 Search Engine Optimisation ( SEO ) Tips for your Website
All businesses want to know the secrets to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). It is the Holy Grail of website design and for website owners. To be honest there are no secrets.There are many articles documenting the steps you need to do to give your website the ultimate chance to get to the first page or the number one spot in search engine results. In most cases it is achievable though it is important to make sure you tick all the SEO boxes and have a little patience. Below is what we believe to be the top 10 tips to help get your website to page 1 on Google.
- Website Structure / Hierarchy
It is important for the structure and hierarchy of your website to be search engine friendly. This is achieved by using the correct headings, meta tags and content using the keywords your potential customers will use to search for your services or products. A professional web designer should understand the requirements for search engines such as Google. - Crawlability / Indexability
Search engines use programs called web spiders/robots to crawl the web finding new websites/content for later processing by a search engine that will index pages to provide fast searches. Therefore, it is important to make sure the search engine spiders/robots can find your website to crawl & index your website.- to help search engines find and index your website make sure your content is readable and not embedded in images or flash files
- use the appropriate alt tags for images
- create easy to use well structured menus for navigation
- create links via the text on the page to relevant content with in your website
- place a sitemap on your website to help spiders/robots search and index all your pages on your website
- submit your website to the major search engines every now and then, especially pages with new content
- Domain Name
Selecting a domain name can be just as important as building a website. If you have an important keyword in the domain name that describes your product or service you will have more of a chance to rank well in search engines. Your domain name may include one of the products or services you offer. It may be worthwhile checking the domain names for sale in case one is available for purchase. Consulting your web designer beforehand is a good idea. - Meta Tags -
Create accurate page titles and use the description meta tag to place important keywords about the content on the page. The description meta tag should be a well written sentence, again using the important keywords. Google tends to use the description meta tag or the page content to best match an individuals search string. - Your content is king
Your site content is one of the most important aspects of SEO, and the most important page on your website is the home page. The home page is also known as the index or entry page to your website. Your home page content needs to be well written using well structured sentences and paragraphs placing your keywords throughout the text. Remember search engines love text. - Improve the structure of your URL's
Search engines look at your URL address when searching your website. Use the most important keywords related to the page in your URL address to help search engines find the correct information for customers. For example www.thewebdesigner.com.au/web-design.html would have more chance of being found than www.thewebdesigner.com.au/php?id=33. It is important to note that your URLs will need to be unique within your website. - Age of your website
The age of your website sadly does affect your ranking. The longer your website has been online the more likely it is to have a higher ranking. However this will also depend on how well your website has been designed. Looking at this positively, there are still a lot of websites out there that do not follow all the SEO rules. This will give you the opportunity to rank well over your competitors even if they have been online much longer than you. - Hosting location for your website
It is important to host your website in the country that you are targeting. If you target market is Australia then your website should be hosted within Australia. Search engines are becoming more localised everyday. In Australia they look for Australian servers first. It is important however that your server is also reliable and fast. If your web server is down or very slow your website won't be found by your customers or search engines trying to index your website. - Keep your website up to date regularly
Make sure your website is up to date with your the latest news & information about you, your company, your services and products you offer. Some websites update content hourly. This maybe very difficult and take to much time for the majority of businesses. To give you an idea your website should be updated weekly or monthly if possible, or at the minimum every quarter. Search engines love new content, especially if the content is relevant to the topics & keywords used by searchers in their search engine. However it is important for the information you update on your website to be useful to your customers and relevant to your industry or service. - Linking popularity
Get your website listed on as many online directories and industry based sites as possible. In coming links are like votes for your website, the more links you have to your website will help enhance your search engine ranking. It is important to make sure that they are useful to your customer. Search engines give more votes to links for your website from important, relative and popular websites.
To find out more please visit our website www.thewebdesigner.com.au
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