A great website’s no good unless it gets lots of visitors and keywords are a really important way to help people find your site. There’s a bit of an art to getting the perfect amount of keywords in just the right place – but let us help you get it right!

What are keywords anyway?

When customers are looking for a business, service or product using a search engine they enter a phrase describing what they are looking for, known as a ‘keyword’ or ‘query’, into a search engine, which then generates a list of websites containing that keyword.   The results are often referred to as ‘SERPS’ – search engine results pages.

Search engines send ‘spiders’ to visit websites, which crawl through the pages looking to see what keywords are contained in the text and HTML code.  This means that you want to make sure that your web pages contain the keywords that your target audience are searching for, so that the spider remembers and calls up your site if someone makes a relevant search.

The joy of keywords

Common keywords – like ‘shoes’ or ‘food’ – will generate literally billions of websites. The ideal situation is for your website to appear on the first page of results, since internet searchers are unlikely to look beyond the first couple of pages. For a small site, appearing on the first page of the search engine listings can be extremely difficult for competitive terms – but there are ways around this.

There are search terms which are less competitive, meaning that fewer websites are trying to appear for them – but they could help you attract exactly the kind of visitor your site was built for. For example, the website of a Dorset youth club’s football team might not appear at the top of the listings when someone searches for ‘football club’, but will appear if someone searches for ’Dorset youth football'.  As the internet searcher is probably under 18, in the Dorset area and keen to practice their footie skills, there is a very good chance they are going to want the service the club offers. 

How many keywords?

Search engine spiders check for something called ‘keyword density’ – how often a keyword appears on a webpage. They will get suspicious if, for example, every other word is ‘youth football’. You want to aim for a keyword to appear a few times on a page, but not too much. The perfect ratio is that your keyword makes up between three and 7% of the total text. Consider what your visitors will think – the website is primarily for them, not the engines, so focus chiefly on writing good and useful content, with the chance to get a cheeky keyword in an added bonus!

Position the keywords well

Search engine spiders  always read from the top of the web page, and so recognise the content in the header as important – so your keyword should also appear in the web page’s header text (this is the bar that goes across the top of your website), as well as any paragraph titles and image descriptions.

So, on our imaginary youth club’s home page, they should include the phrase ‘Dorset youth football’ in their header and page titles.

Keywords and Mr Site

With a Mr Site package, it’s easy to add your keywords not only into your text but into your headers and image tags, using our ‘META tag’ tool. But if you ever have any questions – just get in touch and we’d love to give you further advice!

The great thing about using Mr Site is that you don’t need to be an IT whiz to create a great website – even if you know nothing about HTML you can achieve professional results. But if you’ve been thinking that you’d like to expand your technical knowledge and take your web-building skills to the next level – we’d love to help you get there and learning basic HTML is the place to start.

So what is HTML?

If you’re a bit of a newbie, then you’ve probably heard the word HTML being bandied about but are unsure what it means. HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It’s the language that website designers use to build websites – the code describes to the internet browser how a site should look and translates the instructions into visuals.

How do I use it?

If you want to tell the internet browser that you want a page to look a certain way, you need to use the right code. So, for example, you are writing a piece of content and want to split the text into two paragraphs.  At the point you want to separate the text, you need to tell the browser that a new paragraph is starting and when it ends.  The code for this is <p> - the ‘p’ stands for ‘paragraph’ – and it’s the part of the code known  as an HTML tag. The brackets are called ‘angle brackets’.

So, the text would need to read

<p>This is paragraph 1</p>

<p>This is paragraph 2</p>

The / indicates the end of the HTML instruction – don’t forget to include it whenever you finish a piece of code; it’s like a full stop.

Using HTML with Mr Site Takeaway Website

With Takeaway Website, you can build your website in one of three modes – Simple, Creative or Advanced.  If you’re just getting started with HTML, we recommend that you use Creative mode. Just click on the HTML button at the bottom left-hand side of your screen and you can start adding your code.  If you’ve already added anything to the page, you’ll see how this translates into HTML.

Common coding

We’ve covered creating paragraphs, but there’s a huge amount more you can do with HTML. For now, we’ll go through three very basic HTML codes:

        Headers
To create a header on a webpage, you need to use this code:
<h1>I’ve made a header!<h1>
If you want to create a secondary header underneath it – so it looks smaller – the numbers change, all the way to size 6 font:
<h2>Now a smaller header<h2>

       Adding links to a page
When you type your content and want to add a link you can of course just type in the full website address of the page you want to link to. But if the address of the page is long – or even just to make your site look more professional – then you can also turn a piece of content into a hyperlink (a word or phrase website visitors click on to be taken to a particular page).
The code for this is:
<a href="http://www.mylink.com" >click here</a>
You can add whatever web address you want between ‘’ and ‘’ – and whatever word or phrase you want between > and <

        Images
You can add an image to your webpage using the tag <img>. You also need to include the tag ‘scr’, which helps the browser find the right image.
The total code looks like this:
<img src=http://www.mywebsite.co.uk/USERIMAGES/myimage.jpg />
The internet address within the tags is where the browser can find the image – when you upload an image onto your Takeaway Website it is saved in a file called www.websitename.co.uk/USERIMAGES. You are asked to give the image a title (myimage) and the last bit of the address above describes what kind of file it is, in our example a jpg. Image files can be jpgs or gifs – make sure you put the right ending on the image address when you write your code.
You should also add a text description to your image, known as an ‘alt’ tag. This explains what the image is of, in case the image ever doesn’t show up, and helps search engines and the blind using screen reader devices identify it.
This code looks like this:
<img scr=http://www.mywebsite.co.uk/USERIMAGES/myimage.jpg alt=”This is my image”>

Learn more....

That’s just very, very basic coding – there is so much more you can learn. Whatever you want to do with your site, it’s just a matter of finding the code. We highly recommend Lynda, a website that’s got some great teaching resources to help you become an HTML expert.
If you want a more old-school teaching guide, then the ‘Dummies’ series of guides has a good one on HTML, called, unsurprisingly, HTML, XHTML and CSS for Dummies

‘Search engine optimisation’ or ‘SEO’ is how people refer to the process of getting a website high up on the search engine rankings. It can seem a daunting prospect – not least because there’s a huge amount of confusing jargon that gets thrown around. But when you get your head around the different terms, anyone can successfully make their website easy to find – so we’ve written a quick and easy guide to help you understand the lingo.

 A is for….

AdWords (link - http://www.google.co.uk/adwords) –  Google’s main source of advertising revenue, these are ‘paid’ search listings – the ones that appear at the top and side of a search page. Websites bid to appear when users search for particular keywords.  

Affiliate marketing – When a website owner gets paid a commission for the number of visitors, leads or sales that they refer to a merchant site.

Algorhithm – The formula used by a search engine to decide on the ranking of web pages (ie. whether they appear on the first, second or third page in search listings, and how high up on the page). 

Analytics (link - http://www.google.com/analytics/) – Google offers a free analytics service which allows website owners to gather information about their site traffic, such as website visits (hits), page views, and the average time visitors spend on their site. 

Authority – A topical site which is trusted by the internet community and frequently referenced by other sites or blogs as a source of reliable information. A ‘topical authority’ might be a well-known blogger, the website of a big brand or a Wikipedia page (link  - www.wikepedia.com). 

B is for…

Backlinks – Sometimes referred to as ‘Incoming links’, backlinks are links to a webpage from another site. 

Bait and Switch – A term used to describe an online marketing technique whereby a website includes content designed to get people talking about the site or using it as good source of information, thus encouraging search engines to give them high search ranking, before launching a campaign to use the website for sales.  

Banned – When a search engine bans a site from appearing in search listings. Generally this happens if website owners try to achieve high search engine results through fraudulent means, such as including hidden text (see below) in a webpage. 

Bot – This is another way of saying ‘robot’, which is the tool search engines send to websites and webpages to ‘crawl’ through them, ranking their content and gathering the information which helps the search engine index the pages.  More commonly known as a ‘spider’. 

Broad match – When someone enters a set of keywords into a search engine, websites appear in the listings that broadly match the keywords searched for.  For example, if  someone searches for the phrase ‘milk chocolate’, the search engine  will return results that do not exactly fit the search term but are close or in a different order, such as ‘chocolate milk’ or ‘dark chocolate’.  See ‘Exact match’. 

C is for….

Click-through – Describes when a website visitor clicks on a link to go to another web page. 

Conversion – When a website visitor makes a desired action on a website, for example making a purchase or signing up to receive a newsletter. 

CTR – Click Through Rate. This refers to how many times an online advertisement or link is clicked on.

Content – The basic term referring to the information, text, video, music or images contained by a webpage. 

D is for….

Directory – A website or page containing listings of websites or businesses, categorized and edited by real people. 

Dynamic content – This term describes web or blog content that changes regularly and engages visitors. As well as traditional text, it may include video, audio or animated material. It is increasingly seen as the best kind of web content. 

E is for….

Entry page – The page through which someone enters your site. 

Exact match – When someone enters a phrase into a search engine, a website will appear only when someone enters an exact phrase. So, a chocolate company may request that they only appear in listings if someone searches for the exact phrase ‘dark chocolate’. See ‘Broad Match’. 

F is for….

Filters – Programs used by search engines to identify website content that is considered to be spam. Websites with spam content appear lower down – or are even banned entirely – on the search engines. 

Flash intro – This is a brief animated short, made using Flash, that some websites have on their homepage, which must be played before a surfer can enter into the main website. As well as being quite irritating as they can load slowly, they can cause a website’s search engine rankings to suffer, as search engines don’t ‘read’ the content in Flash. 

Fresh – When a website has content that is ‘fresh’, this means that it has regularly changing content. Bots return more frequently to websites with fresh content, pushing those websites up the search listings. 

G is for…

Google – Google is the world’s most popular search engine, so when you are researching your page rankings or considering spending money on paid search listings, Google should be a priority. Which doesn’t mean you should ignore other search engines completely – cover all your bases. 

Guestbook spam – Extremely irritating spam tool, where spammers add links to websites in guestbooks. 

H is for….

Header tags – Header tags break up your webpage’s content into different sections. Search engines often give them more importance than ordinary text. So if for example your page is all about British history and your primary header text is ‘The Tudors’, some search engines will give this phrase a higher ranking than the rest of the page’s text when they are indexing the page. 

Hidden text – this is a way rogue websites try to get higher up the search engines, but adding keywords in the same colour as the webpage, thus making them invisible to visitors. Search engines heavily penalize websites found to be doing this. 

Hits – Careful about this one. ‘Hits’doesn’t actually mean how many people have visited your site – that’s a very common misconception. It literally means how many files are downloaded from a webpage, so if a webpage has 3 image files on it one person viewing that page would count as 4 ‘hits’. ‘Visits’ or ‘page impressions’ refers to the number of visitors a webpage has had. 

Home page – As the main page on your site, this page should be easier to get up the search engine rankings.  Make sure you’ve got your most important keywords visible – but don’t forgeot, some visitors will arrive at your site through your other pages so don’t just focus on this page’s SEO!

Hyperlinks – See ‘Links’. 

I is for….

Impression – When a specific user access a website – it’s a way of counting how often a website is visited.  A much more accurate term than ‘hits’. 

Index – Search engines ‘index’ website pages so that when someone makes a search, the relevant documents appear quickly, with the most relevant pages appearing higher up on the search engines. 

K is for….

Keywords -  Keywords are the words or phrases web surfers will commonly type into a search engine to find websites with the information or products they are looking for. You want to have keywords in your web page content, as this will help searchers find you through sites like Google. 

Keyword density – How often a keyword appears on a webpage, compared to the total amount of text. It’s important to balance the two. 

For the second half of the A to Z, make sure you check out next month’s great newsletter!

If you’re not getting the website hits you were hoping for or are unsure about what you should be doing to raise the online profile of your company, May’s Expert of the Month column is perfect for you. iTrigga are the SEO(search engine optimisation) and social media specialists who help online businesses boost their search engine rankings and connect with consumers online . They’ve got some great advice about creating an SEO strategy that will really have an impact...

“Natalie Massenet, founder and chairman of high-end online retailers Net-A-Porter really put her finger on the changing face of SEO when she said, “In the next five years, media companies are going to become retailers and retailers are going to become media companies. It’s inevitable.”

Recent changes to Google’s search criteria has seen websites with compelling, fresh and regularly updated content emerge as the big winners in the search visibility and rankings stakes. Increasingly, it’s not enough for an online business to have a great-looking, accessible website – content and social media presence are becoming seriously important.

 At iTrigga, there are three key areas we believe forward-thinking businesses should be making a priority for the future:

User engagement

Encouraging visitors to make return visits to your site and lengthening their browsing time is crucial for driving up revenue. Think of the basic principle of ‘window shopping’ – the longer a potential customer spends on your site, the more likely they are to be interested in what you’re selling. 

So how can you make sure your business has an attractive window dressing? ‘Sticky’ content is one sure-fire way:

• Offer your customers genuinely exciting content related to their interests and they will stay for longer and keep coming back.

• Up-to-date news feeds and quality editorial articles are fantastic ways to deliver a more engaging user experience. 

Social media 

Social networking pages are gaining clout in search engine rankings, with Twitter pages often ranking highly in search results due to their fresh and up-to-date content. This means that it is more important than ever for brands to establish a social presence and identity. Social word of mouth is crucial for generating buzz around your business – and likes and retweets are how success is measured. 

• Businesses should ensure that they have branded Twitter and Facebook pages and are using them to connect with customers in a tangible way.

• Concise news updates via Twitter are a great way to keep customers informed on new products and relevant topics of interest. 

• Facebook and Twitter pages can also be used as a touch-point for customer enquiries or troubleshooting. 

• Keyword-optimised, topical Facebook status updates are not only good for search engine rankings, but can spark discussion, banter, likes and real interaction. 

Differentiation

One of the biggest challenges for businesses is standing out from the crowd. In any given niche, your website could be competing with thousands of others providing similar products or services – so how do you enhance your visibility? The simple answer is: content. 

The benefits of investing in content for e-commerce businesses are huge - great content:

• Makes you more findable by improving your search position.

• Gives you enhanced credibility and authority.

• Increases user engagement.

Great search engine rankings and lots of social media interaction doesn’t just happen automatically – you need to put the work in to reap the rewards. But if you think about those three main areas thoughtfully and strategically and devote  time to creating exciting content and a dynamic social network, then it really will  add up to what every online retailer needs: increased revenue.”

If you want to find out more, or even get some professional advice on optimizing your website’s content, you can contact iTrigga at sales@itrigga.com. 
Plus, the Learning Academy has some great articles about submitting your website to the search engines and boosting your search engine rankings. 

“Networking can be a hugely powerful tool for any business, whether you want to get your company’s name known, find partners for a new venture or just make contacts for the future. Good networkers will find that the more contacts they make, the more referrals they get for their business.

Since the boom of Twitter and LinkedIn, we tend to think of networking as something done largely online. Not true – even in these social-media heavy times, nothing can replace the power of a face-to-face, personal connection.

However, for most people it can be difficult to find opportunities to increase their network of contacts. Just like dating, you need to seek out opportunities to meet useful and interesting people.

An excellent place to start is by attending a trade show relevant to your industry. You could even hire a stall for your company. Not only are trade show attendees very responsive to making new connections, but you can also see what your competition is doing. You could also research industry networking events or join an organization like 4networking, become a member of a trade association or consider attending a conference.

If you are the kind of person who feels uncomfortable striking up conversations with strangers, let alone pushing an agenda, don’t worry. Here are my top tips:

• Unique selling point – what can your business offer that others can’t? What services do you provide and what makes them special? Prepare – and practice – a 30 second summary of your company.
• Plan ahead – whatever the event, get hold of the invite list ahead of time and decide who you are going to meet. This also gives you time to research attendees to provide you with an edge.  
• Be interested – everyone likes to talk about themselves. Ask lots of questions about the other person’s business needs, find out what their goals are and then you can better pitch yourself as someone who they could find useful.
• No sales – networking is about building relationships, not closing a deal. That – hopefully – can come later.
• Body language  –  you might be saying all the right things but your body language can let you down. Take note of your posture, aiming for a straight-backed, confident stance. Shake hands firmly but without giving the impression you are trying to break your contact’s hand. Make eye-contact throughout. Smile occasionally, but not constantly.
• Give back – if someone needs a service that you can’t provide, but you know who can, don’t be shy to recommend someone else in your network. You pitch yourself as a problem solver, while making it more likely that the person you recommend will one day return the favour.
• Take notes – make sure you note down any important or potentially useful details about the contacts you have met and store this information carefully. This will help you make more of an impact when you follow up and can prove useful later.
• Follow up – this is absolutely crucial. You could send a friendly email, message them through LinkedIn or pop that information pack in the post like you promised…just make sure you build on the first meeting, while your contact remembers who you are.

Networking is something that takes practice, but once you've been to a few events you'll find that you quickly get the hang of it. Invest some time in making contacts - and in the long-term it could really pay off!