Friday 27 March 2015

The Importance of a Long Term, Sustainable SEO Strategy



When it comes to SEO, there’s a vast amount of the web occupied by articles relaying information on how to appease the search engines and their complex algorithms; mainly because everyone with a website wants to claim the prolific top spot. Often words like ‘penguin’, ‘panda’, ‘white hat’ and ‘black hat’ crop up, and such terminology can be quite confusing and intimidating for an SEO novice. This weeks article aims to simplify the SEO process, focusing on link building, and enlighten you on why developing a long term, sustainable SEO strategy is of great value and importance. We promise, it isn’t all that complicated.

We've chosen to concentrate on the link building aspect of SEO because it’s the area we find people are most worried about and ill informed on. Because the search engine’s algorithms change frequently, website rankings can fluctuate. This is because the algorithm determines the search results and how they calculate a websites relevancy alters. When a website suddenly drops to the bottom of the search engine results, it’s usually associated with poor quality backlinking, AKA black hat techniques. This is every site owners fear and with a great deal of SEO companies out there, it can be tricky to know which one to trust with such an important task, especially if you’re not fully informed on the subject.

First and foremost, what is a backlink?

It’s all fine and dandy if an SEO company explains that gaining backlinks is a crucial part of improving your search engine rank and the more of them the merrier, but if you don’t know what one is, you can be totally flummoxed. A link acts as an avenue that leads a user on another, usually relatable website, to yours. As an example, if your website sells health foods, a link from the National Institute for Nutrition would be really valuable. The backlink would be created if the Institute mentioned your health food site on their website/ blog/ social network and provided a way for the user to reach your site. Pretty straightforward, right? The difficult part is gaining enough links from other websites to show the search engines that yours is the one to rank well on your chosen keywords.

How can SEO companies assist the link building process?

No one knows, apart from the search engines themselves, exactly what makes up their algorithms. From experience, we have a pretty great idea and with almost 4000 clients, we’re able to spot trends really quickly. So, it’s the norm for SEO companies to alter and update the way they build links and each may favour different techniques. Commonly, SEO companies will try to create backlinks by publishing content that inspires sharing, emailing bloggers, submitting sites to directories, or sometimes paying for links to be placed on relevant websites (the latter we wouldn’t advise). Here at Click Submit, we advertise your site to webmasters of relevant websites. It is up to them whether they decide to link build or not. For us that is the key element in our SEO; only webmasters who want to link to your site and who think it appropriate, will do so. This is a very natural, white hat (AKA moral) SEO method.

The more the merrier

The assumption that the more backlinks you carry, the better your site will rank is quite true, but the type of backlinks you gain play a large factor in this too. Any links that appear spammy or manipulated will be picked up by the search engines and not recognised. An example of a poor quality link would be one that you’d placed yourself, such as a comment on someone else’s blog. So if you were to build 500 low quality links overnight, you might notice a quick bump up the search engine rankings, but you’d be foolish to think you would stay there.
When the search engine algorithms update, this is the time many businesses notice their rank fluctuate. If you concentrate your efforts on building a portfolio of relevant, good quality links, you should have a positive outcome from any update because the links won’t be discounted. Also, Google/ Yahoo/ Bing are only trying to improve their search results so if you’re ticking all the right boxes and working alongside their SEO guidelines, you should be rewarded for doing so.

How soon should I expect to see results? I need results NOW!

We’ve been in the SEO world a while, and if we’d been given £1 for every time a client had asked us how long it would take for them to be on page 1 for their desired search term, we’d be millionaires, all of us. And if we could make all our clients appear on page 1 overnight and stay there, we’d be billionaires. So, let’s make it quite clear that to see the best, most consistent results, SEO is a long-term investment. Because every keyword has a different level of competition, it’s impossible to give an exact time frame for when you’ll start to notice an impact from our service, so we always suggest between 3 and 9 months. We aim to build between 150-300 links per quarter; this is where we have found optimum results. We’ll also make sure those links are categorized and even geo targeted where possible. Links will decay over time so SEO needs to be an on-going process to maintain and improve your rank.

How you can further help your SEO:

If you’re eager to progress the SEO process yourself, there are loads of ways you can do so. Here are a few suggestions:

Create a blog: Creating a blog is a great way to engage your clients. Evidently, we think so. If you can publish interesting content, it may encourage existing and potential clients to interact with you. You can share these blogs on your social profile/s as well. If people interact with and share your blog on their websites, the search engine algorithms will recognise this. If someone were to share your blog and create a link back to your website, it would count as a backlink. Yippee.

FYI: You could always contact bloggers who are well followed in your industry and ask them to test your product/s and agree that if they like them, they’ll write about them.

Go social: In last week’s blog we went to town on explaining how growing your social profile can help grow your business. It can really help your SEO too. If you can build up a popular social network, this will help improve your rank. Plus, if you’re a client, you can take advantage of our free Like to Follow product. This will help you gain likes and follows from trustworthy businesses.

Link to your customers: If you regularly work with another agency/ company/ client, displaying their logo on your website that links to theirs and vice versa is a great way of growing your backlink portfolio. These are people you know and trust so you can be assured that the link will be of a high quality.

Viral: Every business owners dream is to create one piece of content that goes viral. So keep brainstorming because if you manage to achieve it, you’ll have hit the jackpot for SEO and your business.

With all the above in mind, don’t spend all of your time trying to please the search engines. If you create/have created a fantastic website that’s developed with SEO in mind, and you’re exploring avenues like social sharing, blogging, gaining testimonials, then you’re the perfect top rank material.
Please let us know if you have any link related questions. We hope we have explained backlinks clearly and helped increase your SEO knowledge. If you have any blog requests, contact me via twitter @Annabelle_CS.

Have a great day,
Annabelle

Monday 23 March 2015

Help Grow Your Business With Social Media, For Free!


You may have noticed over the past few weeks that our blogs have become even more content heavy. There are two reasons for this. Most importantly, we’re eager to educate our clients on how to achieve their online marketing goals and assist their SEO. Secondly, with almost 4000 clients, we’re able to spot search engine algorithm trends and we are certain that developing a strong social profile is becoming an increasingly large focal point of SEO. It does appear that the search engines are placing more and more emphasis on social signals as a way to determine their search results. Therefore, this blog is tailored towards social media and how to use it to benefit both yourselves (our clients) and your clients. And I guess it’s helping us with our SEO at the same time!

Quite literally, social media are websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking. The two most well known of these are Facebook and Twitter. They are the perfect platform for engaging, communicating and interacting with your clients outside of your website, in real time. If used productively, they can help you further build your relationships with your clients and show off what amazing services you provide. In turn, this should help your company’s growth and search engine rank too.

If you think that your industry doesn’t suit social media and you’re not confident that your customers are online, then let us look at a few stats that would suggest otherwise:

1.) 72% of all Internet users are now active on social media
2.) There are now over 1.15 billion Facebook users
3.) And over 550 million registered Twitter users
4.) 93% of marketers use social media for business
5.) 89% of adults between 18-29 use social media, but 60% of 50-60 year olds are active and so are 43% of people over the age of 65! So it’s not just youths online

It is most definitely an avenue you need to explore and use to your advantage, and if you haven’t started doing so, it’s about time that you did!

FYI: There’s one thing you must make sure you’re prepared to do before creating a social media profile, and that is to commit to using it. We will warn you now, there’s nothing less appealing than a potential client finding a half pulled together, irregularly updated profile page. Firstly, there will be a competitor doing a better job and secondly, it will poorly reflect your business. You need to remember that everything you create outside of your website, visible to the public, is an extension of your brand and service. And it will require time and energy to make sure it displays how ace you are.

Where to start?

Let’s begin by addressing two of the most powerful and influential social media networks, Facebook and Twitter. If you’re totally new to social media marketing, these are the two we advise you to crack first. Both parties allow you to create ‘pay per click’ advertising campaigns, but below we’re going to discuss what you can gain for free.

Facebook for free

Facebook was launched by Mark Zuckerberg back in 2004. It began as a means for college students to communicate online and is now used across the globe for personal and business use, by over 1 billion people. Crikey!

To make the most out of Facebook for your business the first thing you need to do is:
Create a business page

- You’ll need to have a personal Facebook account to be able to create a business page, so if you haven’t one already, go sign up

- When you create your business page, Facebook will allow you to request a web address such as www.facebook.com/clicksubmitlimited This will allow your social page to reflect your domain name/ website, making the transition between the two easy and associable for your users

- Invite your existing clients to ‘Like’ your page. You can contact them directly through Facebook, or send an email letting all your clients know that you’ve arrived on Facebook and to ‘Like’ you for real time updates

- You can create Events on Facebook. So if you’re opening a new shop, why not invite your clients to it via Facebook? Or, if you’re about to launch a new service or product, you can create interest and demand by creating an Event for it

- You could also form a Facebook group. For example, if you have a specific service you want to discuss with a potential client/s, you could create a group to converse through and plough information into. These can be made private so only who you want to see them, will see them

- Facebook Messenger will allow you to contact people directly. For example, a client may hit you with a query on your page and you can respond via Facebook messenger directly and privately
The above points quickly summarize Facebook for business, but for more detailed info have a read here: https://www.facebook.com/business/overview

Twitter for free

Twitter was born in 2004 and allows you to ‘tweet’ a short burst of information to your followers. There are over 500 million users worldwide and hundreds of millions of tweets sent every day.

Sign up and Tweet
Write 140 character messages to engage with your clients. These updates can range from questions, to try and engage clients, links to blogs and news on any updates/ offers available.

Follow existing clients and businesses with shared interests to create a Twitter community.

Like Facebook, you can direct message followers/ those you are following, so you can engage privately through the network too.

This is also a condensed description of Twitter, but for more info on how you can utilize it for your business, head here: https://business.twitter.com/basics

Tip: Two basic symbols to know about for both:

@Name: If you @name e.g. @clicksubmit, you will be directing your message towards them, or tagging that person in the post. For example, I might write: ‘Hey @Clicksubmit, why is your service so affordable?’ Click Submit would be informed of the message and be able to respond to you directly.

#word: You can use a hashtag in a tweet/ update before a relevant word to categorize it. For example, when we blog we always include #seo. This means if anyone is searching for SEO on Twitter/ Facebook, they’ll see our post in the search results.

There are tons of guides online that will assist you in far more detail than we have above (another time!) but we wanted to give you a snippet of ground knowledge to get you started.

Once you have set yourself up, you’ll be eager to gain some followers/ likes and attract some attention. Make sure you use our free and fantastic Like To Follow product to help you do this. All the likes/ follows it generates are from reputable businesses (they’re simply all our clients): https://www.clicksubmit.co.uk/social/like-to-follow-strategy It’s such a popular product and unique in the marketplace. We would never recommend paying for popularity!

Facebook and Twitter are just two of many popular social networks. LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest are following suit and definitely ones to consider when growing your social profile portfolio.

How to use social media to help grow your business

So, you might have managed to get yourself a profile set up but it can be a little overwhelming to know what content to publish, so here are a few ideas on how to engage your followers and use it to help grow your business.

Educate
This is the type of content we prioritise publishing. By producing content that educates our client base, it helps them learn how to use our services effectively whilst also improving their knowledge of online marketing. This could be done via a blog, for example, if you specialise in web development, it would be good to write an article on the difference between template and bespoke built websites. Or, if you know that your clients aren’t utilizing a couple of your products optimally, make them aware of it by sharing more information about them.

Question and Answer
Don’t be afraid to ask your followers questions. As a suggestion; If you’re thinking of upgrading your website, ask your clients what they like most about it already and what keeps them returning time after time. These types of questions will help you learn more about your business from a user perspective and discover what works well and what doesn’t.
The questions don’t always have to be related to your service! Q&A’s are simply a great way to generate interaction. For example, if there’s a series being broadcast on TV that you know a lot of your clients are likely to be watching, ask them about it!

Product development
As your business grows, you are sure to expand on your initial product offerings. Sharing these ideas and new products via social media can be a great way to generate interest and gain feedback too.

Show Off
Social media can be another platform to share your customer testimonials or success. This will be the kind of information potential clients are looking for and you want to persuade them to convert. For example, if you’re an online estate agent, you may share information about properties that you’ve just sold and how much money you have managed to save your client/s!

Let them see YOU
Behind every business are real people, would you believe, and we’re not all that different, really. So it can be good to drop the barrier and give your clients an insight into the people that keep your ship sailing. So if you’re out on a team building day, don’t hesitate to upload a picture of all those happy faces to share with your followers and potential clients. If your followers can put a few faces to the brand, it’ll help gain trust.

Offer Alert
You might want to share news of current offers too. Occasionally, you could share a special deal solely for you Twitter/ Facebook fans. This will help generate business, increase your popularity and also give you an idea of how many people are engaging with you socially.

Another factor to consider is customer service
Your customer support is likely to extend to your social profile. If a client wants a quick response or has a complaint to make, it’s common for them to reach you by posting a public comment. Don’t be put off by this, just make sure that you check your account/s everyday so your response is quick. How quickly and in what manner you respond will impact how other potential clients view the question/ complaint/ concern. If you can rectify the situation and generate a happy outcome, then it will turn even a negative situation into a positive one.
When it comes to deciding how often to update your social media profile, this varies depending on the kind of business you run and how regularly you feel it necessary. Don’t publish content for the sake of it; quality over quantity really comes into play here. We always try to publish one educational post per week and a selection of shorter ones throughout it. If you develop a structure for your posts, you may find some regular followers that will come to anticipate them on particular days and times. Get to know your audience and establish when your posts receive the most traffic and which kind generates the most engagement. Most social networks offer some analytical tools to help you do this.

SEO positive

As mentioned at the beginning of this blog, not only will all this hard work and socializing benefit the growth of your business and help strengthen your brand, it will assist your search engine rankings. We are confident that search engines are accommodating social networks in their algorithms and are going to do so more and more. With such a huge amount of people operating within these platforms it would be silly of them not to. Their main goal is to return the most accurate search results possible, so assessing social signals will help them choose what is most relevant to rank.
So, go join the social network and make yourself worthy of that top spot. Have a great week!

Annabelle

PS. Don't forget to follow and like us!

Friday 13 March 2015

SEO Friendly Website Development



Last weeks blog was a pretty lengthy summary of all the things you should consider when developing/ designing a website. We touched upon how important it is to develop your site with the search engines in mind. Seeing as we specialise in SEO, we fully understand how crucial this element is, and quite frankly, one paragraph of words could not quite cut it. So we’ve decided to write a more technical guide on how to structure your site to make it appeal to the search engines. Sorry to all the web developers reading this, we know it makes your work harder, but it’s worth it!

FYI:
If you haven’t read our blog on ‘What to consider when developing your website’, then you should do so before lunging into the below.

On site assessment

As soon as a new client “clicks submit” (excuse the pun), we’re instructed to undertake an onsite assessment. One of our team will have a browse through your site and analyse it using our unique piece of software that cleverly re-enacts what a search engine does when it crawls your site. The essential components we assess are mentioned in this blog post and if we find any errors with the below, we make sure to highlight them in our initial report and ask you to update your site accordingly.

Indexable content

First on the list is indexable content. When piecing together your website, it’s important to make sure all the most important parts are written in HTML format. This will allow the spiders/ bots to see and index the content of your website easily. A few tips to consider are:

Image Alt tags: Although search engine crawlers are pretty advanced these days, it’s still not possible for them to recognise images. Make sure any image uploaded on your site has an alt attribute in HTML so that the search engines have a written description of it

If you have any video or audio content on your website
, provide a transcript for it. You don’t have to mirror the content word for word, but select the key sentences you want to be picked up by the search engines

When a site is flash or uses java plug ins
, it’s difficult for the crawlers to find any information that would deem your site relevant enough to rank, so supplement them with text

By using really useful tools such as our SEO
 analyser, you’ll be able to check what the search engines see.


Site map and crawlable internal links

Assembling an XML sitemap and ensuring the internal links of your site are easily crawlable for the spiders will really help your SEO. An XML sitemap is not to be confused with an HTML site map. The latter is designed for the human and the former plays a significant role in helping the search engines read, crawl and know which pages of your website to index. This doesn’t have to be a list of every page of your website, just include the ones you’d like to appear in search. The links through your site should structure like that of a family tree, and only include the crux of the clan.


Keyword usage and targeting

Keyword usage and targeting is still part of the search engines’ ranking algorithms, so it’s key to ensure your keywords are used regularly and implemented strategically. For example, if you want your page to rank in the search results for ‘watch TV abroad’; you want the phrase ‘watch TV abroad’ to be part of the crawlable content of your site. The search engines will measure how, and how often, keywords are used on each page in order to determine the sites relevancy and calculate its rank. It’s not advised to lump all your important keywords in a box at the bottom of your page, as we see so often. They need to be incorporated in the rest of the text informatively. Don’t worry, this is pretty easy; you can place the phrase in the Title tag, in the URL, two or three times in the content and voila, you’re there.


Title tag

Title tags are part of the Meta tags that appear at the top of your HTML in the <head> area. The title tag is the most crucial single tag in your page because it tells the search engines and the users what the page is about. It appears in bold when your content is published on the search results page, so it needs to be a concise, explanatory description of the pages content. It should be around 65-75 characters in length with the most important keywords towards the front, in order to entice users to your site. So many times we have seen clients with their title tag for their home page as ‘Home’, which won’t help you grab the attention of potential clients or the search engines.


Meta Tags

Meta tags are page data tags that sit between the open and closing head tags in the HTML code of a document, alongside the title tag. These tags aren’t visible to users but are used to tell the browsers, like Google, specific information about the pages on your site. The two crucial types of Meta tags you need to focus on are:

Meta Description: These provide a short description of the page’s content. Often the description is used as the snippet of text that appears in the search results. This should be no more than 160 characters, as the browsers may cut short anything longer than this. It gives you the perfect opportunity to advertise what you offer and along with the title tag, can entice a user to select your page.

Meta Robot tags: these can be used to control where the search engines crawl on your site and what they index. For example, inserting ‘noindex’ prevents the page from being indexed. Inserting ‘nofollow’ prevents the spiders from following links from this page. Inserting ‘nosnippet’ prevents a snippet from being shown in the search results. You can find more information online about which tags each search engine follow and create them accordingly. The robot tags make sure only the most fundamental pages and aspects of your site are visible to the engines.


URL structures (address for documents on the web)

Poorly structured URL’s are a common issue for SEO and can negatively impact your ranking if not structured coherently. Search engines look for keywords in URLs to help them determine their rankings, so if your page name matches a keyword/ phrase input by a user, your site will most likely rank higher on the search results. This does not mean you can stuff your URL with as many keywords as possible; it needs to read well and descriptively. This will benefit your SEO and also the user’s experience.

Tip: Use a hyphen to separate words, not an underscore.


Duplicate content / Canonical tags

Duplicate content refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. With a number of similar content management systems and template driven sites now available on the Internet, duplicate content is common and a problem for SEO and search engines. This is mainly because the spiders aren’t advanced enough to determine which URL they should index and rank. However, there are a few ways to help the search engines and save yourself! Most commonly used is a 301 redirect, which will forward one URL to another. However, a better and far easier method would be to use a Canonical tag. This can be inserted into the head of the page that contains duplicate content and will point the crawler to the master URL that you want to rank well. By including ‘canonical’ in the URL, it lets them know the page is the copy.


We've got you covered!

As part of our quarterly service we offer a compahensive 3 step SEO strategy designed to make sure that your site follows all of the key elements detailed above and more. Plus, as a client we are constantly reasearching the market and adapting our service in order to keep you one step ahead of the competition!
Hopefully this blog has provided some interesting information. Although most of the content is more tailored to developers, we like to educate our clients on SEO methods so that you can really make the most out of our service and improve your websites visibility at the same time. Please let us know if you have any questions.

Monday 9 March 2015

What to Consider When Developing Your Website



In last weeks blog we gave some (hopefully) useful advice on how to pick the right web foundation for your business. So now you’re a little more clued up, we’re going to delve deeper into this web building malarkey and provide some words of wisdom on what to consider when in the process of developing or upgrading your website.

Choosing a domain name and hosting company
There are a million (or more) web hosting and domain selling companies out there. Our sister company recently wrote a brilliant, very informative article on how to choose the right hosting company.

To summarise the key elements, make sure you: Assess whether your website will require shared hosting (for new/ small websites), VPS hosting (for growing, content rich websites receiving a healthy amount of traffic) or a dedicated server (an entire server dedicated to your site; for those receiving a huge amount of traffic and requiring advance features unavailable on the other hosting packages). Check the server uptime record; which should sit above 99.5%. Find out whether your host has a phone number for emergencies and are easily contactable. See if there are some valuable offers that make them stand out from the crowd.
If it’s free, it’s too good to be true, we promise!

In terms of selecting a domain name, there a few elements to factor in: Think about what keywords you would expect a user to search with and try to find a domain that would include or easily be associated with these terms. For example, if you were setting up an online estate agents, a user may search for ‘advertise my house online’, a good domain name would be, www.myhouseadvert.co.uk as it links well with the search terms and explains the service offered. Make it simple, short and easy to spell. Although it is becoming increasingly popular to choose weird and wonderful suffix domains, .uk and .com are still the most search engine friendly.

Clean design
Keeping your designs clean but bursting with information can be tricky, but something we advise doing. A large amount of graphics and too much text can be overwhelming for the user and also distracting. The design of your website reflects the quality of your business and service. Keep it informative but easy to read and navigate through.

Branding & effective colour scheme
Creating a strong brand, logo and choosing an effective colour scheme is more than just a case of what you think looks nice, it’s actually rather physcological! If you look around at all the top companies globally, you’ll often find the use of blue, orange, green and/ or red! For example, take a look at eBay, Google, Facebook, Starbucks. These colours have been selected specifically because of the emotions and feelings they evoke consciously and subconsciously, so do some research before selecting yours.

Content Management Systems
If you want a site that’s more than a collection of static pages, you’ll need a Content Management System (CMS). The nucleus of a CMS is a database that stores user information, articles, blogs, and so forth. The CMS is the brain of the website, and the design is it’s pretty face. The most popular content management systems are Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla. These are all free and customisable, so very popular with a huge amount of designers and developers!

Original content
We’re sure this is a pretty obvious point to make, but we have seen some really awful sites in our time. Making sure your site content is original is really important because your website will be penalised by the search engines otherwise. (This is something to take into consideration if you’re wanting to transfer your website to a new domain! Check over the search engine policies before doing so!) Your design agency may employ a copywriter in house to assist with writing content that will generate leads, such as subtle ‘calls to action’, all of which will encourage and influence the visitor’s level of engagement and improve your ROI.

Functionality, Navigability & Usability
These are 3 key focal points for web designers/ developers. Before your website goes live, check, double check, and triple check that everything functions correctly. Is the load speed good? Are all the links working? If you have a call back form, does it definitely send the information to you? etc.etc. Any slip up in functionality, and that’s likely to be a customer lost. Your website is your chance to impress a potential client and if it doesn’t function, it will reflect poorly on you. The navigation streams of your website need to be obvious and easy to follow as well. If a potential client reaches your site and doesn’t understand how to get around it, they’re unlikely to convert. Display your product and services in a way that will encourage interaction and make it user friendly.

Indexable, SEO friendly code
Not only has your website got to appeal to the user, it’s got to appeal to search engines as well, otherwise, you’re unlikely to even get the opportunity to appeal to a user because you won’t have appealed to the engine that will position you in front of them! It’s hard work trying to please everyone, isn’t it? So to perform well on the search engines, your site needs to be coded in a way that will help guide their spiders/ bots to your site and find it relevant! Your most important content should be written in HTML. And as a warning, never, ever build a site entirely in flash as it will appear barren to the search engines. (At some point in the near future, we shall write a more detailed blog on how to make your new website appeal to the search engines!)

Compatibility with multiple browsers
There are such an array of browsers on offer, so it’s essential that your website is compatible with the big boys like Chrome, Safari, Internet explorer and Firefox!

Mobile/ Tablet friendly
With a huge volume of users searching from their mobiles and tablets these days, it’s vital that your website works well on all devices. When taking this into consideration you’re likely to be a little stuck between choosing a responsive web design or a mobile site. A responsive web design creates dynamic changes to the appearance of your existing website depending on the screen size and orientation of the device being used to view it. It’s very clever, but pricey too! Whereas a mobile site is built and tailored specifically for mobile devices, separate to your existing website, on a slightly different domain. If developed correctly, we would favour a responsive design, since we’re an SEO company and it makes our work easier. But there are a number of articles online that list the pros and cons of both so take some time to read through them and speak to your developer about the two options.

Security
Keeping your site secure for your own interests, and for your clients, is imperative. There are an array of viruses, malicious code infections and more nasty bugs out there, so you need to be smart and keep ahead of the hackers! You can make your site secure with HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure), which protects the confidentiality of your users’ data. In addition, making use of an SSL certificate, which should be provided by your web host, is advised, especially with websites where payment transactions are/ are going to be made.

Analytics
Once you have your website pretty much ready to go, make sure you have some analytical tools set up so that you can monitor and follow the traffic that reaches your site. These tools will enable you to learn so much about your websites functionality e.g. see what pages of your website are most visited, how often a visitor usually stays on your site, and which visitors reach your goal page; the sign up, checkout, or contact page. This information will give you such a useful insight and may benefit your websites development process. We recommend Google Analytics, as it’s free and works well alongside all their other product offerings such as Shopping, AdWords and more.

Testimonials
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again, testimonials are crucial to online success. Only real ones, obvs. Make sure you have set up a page on an independant review centre, such as www.trustpilot.com or www.reviewcentre.com, and in addition have reviews on your website itself. Make sure your testimonials show the testees name and contact details, where possible. The more you can reassure your potential client that you’re the best at what you do, the better.

Active social profile
In addition to ranting on about the importance of testimonials, we’re often blogging about the importance of having an active social profile, whilst keeping ours active too. Even as your website is under development you can create Facebook/ Twitter/ Instagram pages and start blogging about what’s coming up, or anything that relates suitably to your website! Your activity across the web will have an impact on how relevant the search engines deem your website, and therefore, will affect your ranking.

We hope that this blog has been insightful and if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Until next time!
Annabelle