Bizstartup.ie - Start Up Kit

Optimising sites for search relies on using commonly-known best-practice optimisation techniques and a certain amount of testing to see what works best for your website. In terms of best practice, here are a few things to think about before you go to build a site:

1. Domain Name

One of the first things you’ll want to decide is your domain name. Depending on what kind of website you’re setting up this may be your existing brand name or an entirely new one. But if the domain name you decide on includes one of your target keywords, you may be giving your business a slight edge. 

For example, The Educational Company of Ireland is the brand name for www.edco.ie, a company that is nearly 100 years old. It’s a strong brand and everyone knows it sells school books. However, www.schoolbooks.ie also sells school books.  What happens if you type in ‘school books’ into Google Ireland? Although the Educational Company is very relevant for the keyword search ‘school books’, it doesn’t appear on the first page of Google for this search –it appears on the fourth page, and this is searches from Ireland!

It certainly appears that choosing the domain www.schoolbooks.ie has given this business a competitive edge.

Just one other tip on domains, you may want to avoid using hyphen-separated domain names as they are more difficult to say, which may be an issue if you advertise on the radio for example.

2. TLD

This stands for Top Level Domain name, ccTLD stands for the country code Top Level Domain. In Ireland most business tend to choose between a TLD of .com or a country code TLD of .ie. Other TLDs such as .org, .net, .info are not used as much in the commercial world. For those whose sole target market is restricted to Ireland, registering .ie may give you a slight edge if your market place is ultra competitive.

It’s also worth noting that anyone can register a .com domain, but .ie domain names are subject to restrictions — generally you have to be a legitimate registered business. For this reason, a .ie may confer more trust amongst visitors. There is also the downside to this in that there is a lot of unnecessary red tape attached to registering a .ie.

3. Location of hosting

The country where your website is physically hosted can be a factor when the search engines are determining how relevant your website is for search performed in your target country.

For Google, a .ie domain hosted in Ireland will default to appearing in search results for Ireland. A .com hosted in Netherlands will default to that country’s search results. However, you can indicate to Google your target country using Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Generally speaking, when deciding on where to host your website, you should be looking at the quality of the company you are going to host with. You might want to look at the quality and ease of access of their support. Do they have a landline number to call when something goes wrong? Getting the cheapest hosting available is not always a good idea when it comes to building your business online.

4. URLs

Have your developer create search-friendly URLs (page names) which include your keywords. Google recommend hyphen-separated URLs which include keywords. For example, try for something like www.booksexample.com/school/primary-school/math.htm rather than www.booksexample.com/display.asp?isb=97818

5. Design

Flash is popularly used for graphics on websites and can create a very engaging experience.  But while Google can spider SWF files, other search engines may not. So you need to balance the graphic design against content that search bots can easily crawl and index.

Best practice advice from Google is: “Try to use rich media only where it is needed. We recommend you use HTLML for content and navigation. This makes your site more Google-friendly.”  http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=72746#1

One cool site which looks like a game, and was built recently with Flash, is yuuworld.com. Launched in July, it’s unknown to Google yet, so let’s watch to see how it gets indexed. (You can check to see what Google has indexed for a site by googling info:www.booksexample.com)

6. Technical

Load speed is now a ranking factor with Google. If your site looks fantastic and zeitgeist, but is slow to load pages, then Google may rank it lower as it believes visitors won’t wait around. Your web developer can combine JavaScript and CSS files to speed up the load time.

The technical infrastructure of your site should allow search bots to crawl it successfully. Make sure the code is clean and easily crawled. There are tools available to show how it will look to a spider. Once you’re up and running check Google Webmaster Tools for any crawl errors.

The load speed may also be related to your hosting provider.

7. Blog

One of the big attractions for search engines is frequently updated content. Blogs are a great way to tick this box. A blog offers much more though - the chance to engage with your visitors, share information, get feedback and show your expertise in the area. On the other hand, maintaining a blog requires an on-going commitment to keep it fresh. Either way, you’ll want to decide whether you want this functionality before you go to your developer. 

Increasingly popular is the technique of developing your website using a common blogging platform like WordPress. This can be highly customisable and is an easy and quick way to get started. It also gives you the flexibility of having a content management system from day one.

8. Sitemaps

Include a Sitemap for visitors and an XML Sitemap for search engines. It’s easy for your web developer to do, it’s good for usability and it may make it easier for search engines to crawl the site.

9. Analytics

Have your developer verify the site with Google for Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics. This is simple to do - it involves putting a snippet of code, provided by Google, on your site. It will give you access to important tools and significant information about your traffic. This will position you for later tweaking.

In SEO terms, your next (big) steps will be the content, on-page optimisation and the link-building – what might be called the ‘heavy lifting’ part of SEO. But these are another day’s work. Then, how successful you are, as with most endeavors, will depend on the competition!

More information can be found here.