Internet Articles

List of top directories

Rexino — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 23:59:15 +0000

Directories are used by people looking for popular sites on a particular topic. If you want people searching for your topic to find your site, you will need to have your site listed in the main directories related to your industry. If you’re not there, people will not find you. It is impossible to list all directories as the number continues to grow.

A secondary benefit of being listed in directories is that the major search engines will see that your site is associated with a particular category and associate you with that category. In addition, the more relevant links you get to your site, the higher your search engine ranking.

Directory submission

Most directories are human-edited, which means that your submission will be evalutated by the owner of the directory and categorised in relation to its content. Directories have several types of listings, which determine the speed at which your site will be listed and the prominence on the site:

Free submission
Reciprocal link
Paid submission
Featured or pormotional listing
Affiliate link

Directory list

Below is a list of our top generalist directories:

Open Directory Project
Yahoo! Directory
JoeAnt
Bestoftheweb
Skaffe
Goguides
Abilogic
Uncoverthenet

Website Design

Rexino — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 01:01:28 +0000

Website design is not all about designing a website that looks good, but one that is also easy to navigate, provides good content and is search engine friendly. Whether this is your first website design (unlikely) or you’re planning of redesigning your existing website, you’re reading this article to get some tips on how to design your website.

What is your website all about
Decide who will build it
Make it search engine friendly
Categorise your information
What functionality will you require
Decide on sitewide and section navigation
Create the template
Generate the copy
Test, measure, optimise, improve

Basics of building a new website

Rexino — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 02:56:45 +0000

The thought of building a website from scratch may seem daunting for many small business owners. This article provides a step-by-step guide to enable individuals and small business owners to register their own domain, find cheap web hosting, design and develop their site and finally measure and optimise the results.

Register your domain

While most large businesses have a website, it is estimated that about 40% of small business owners still don’t have one - the worst believe it or not are accountants and plumbers. Every business needs a good website or they are missing out on the huge amount of people who use the web as their starting point to research new products and services. First of all you’ll need to find and register a domain that is still available. You don’t actually buy the domain, but you buy the right to use the domain exclusively (usually for a period of 2 years at a time), and you maintain that right until you pay you fees. Nominet is the Internet registry for .uk domain names. You can use the free Nominet WHOIS service to find information about existing domain names ending in .uk. You can either look for your business name, or you can decide on a generic name related to your category. Once you find the domain name that is right for you (and is free), then you will need to register it via a registrar (ISP or registration agent). There are hundreds of registrars, but due to cost and service we suggest you look at 1and1, 123-reg or UKReg. They all offer you the ability to check if domains are available and provide hosting solutions.

Find cheap web hosting

I strongly recommend you host your website with the company you registered your domain with. Actually, you may find that some registrars will offer you a bundle that already includes both domain registration and hosting (plus loads more). This will help you manage things more easily in the long term, so look at the hosting solutions offered by the companies above. When you look at hosting, you will need to take an important decision: Linux hosting vs Microsoft hosting. My preference is for Linux, as it’s stable, reliable, efficient and provides access to open source (free) software, while MS hosting makes it easier to integrate with other MS development tools. It is entirely up to you, but if this whole process sounds too complicated just give us a call and we can help.

Design and develop your website

We will cover this in tomorrow’s article.

Measure and optimise your results

We will cover this in Friday’s article.

Top sites for researching financial products

Rexino — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 18:59:38 +0000

We’ve listed the top sites customers use for researching financial products online. These sites are usually one of the many resources poeple use in the “consideration” phase of the online customer journey, as well as search engines, email, reviews and affiliate sites.

Research financial products online

confused.com
moneysavingexpert
moneysupermarket.com
fool
uswitch
kelkoo
moneyexpert
Yahoofinance
MSNfinance

Please let us know if you find out other useful financial websites.

Latest trends in online marketing and behaviour

Rexino — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 18:19:20 +0000

So what’s going on out there? This is our very brief review of the changes that are taking place in online, mobile internet and social networking.

Mobile internet

It seems that more poeple own a lot more devices (especially younger ones), especially mobile phones. Does this mean that mobile internet is taking off? I don’t think so. Unless the issues with common standards, security, cost of devices and connection, and especially usability are resolved, mobile internet will not take off.

Social Networking

Given the number of people who now have access to the internet via broadband, we don’t believe there will be a significant growth in usage driven by new people accessing the web. We believe usage will continue to grow, but this will come from people spending more time online and via new technologies. Social computing is still growing, and we believe a significant number of niche social network sites will emerge over the next few months. The business model behind these is still uncertain, but it’s likely to start free (and be paid for by advertising), followed by the development of real value community sites and some sort of subscription model or sponsorship.

Use analytics to improve your site conversion

Rexino — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 15:55:58 +0000

This article is aimed at small businesses trying to improve the conversion they get from their website. Small businesses usually have very few resources available, and usually the website is only one of the many tools the marketing manager needs to look after. I have therefore tried to summarise the best ways a small business can use website analytics to improve conversion.

Install Google analytics

It surprises me how many small businesses have a website but have no idea how many people are visiting it, what are the most popular pages, which search engines they are coming from and what they are doing once they are on the site. All you need is a web analytics tool. There are several very good packages out there, but for a small business I would recommend Google Analytics. First of all Google Analytics is a free website analytics tool. It is easy to download and to set up. It can also easily link to any paid for or organic search activity you undertake with Google, giving you a clear indication of which keywords are driving traffic and sales, and whic not.

Measure your website traffic over time

Using Google Analytics, small business owners can easily review the overall traffic coming to their site, then start breaking it down by source (i.e. search engine, pay-per-click, affiliates…), by keyword, by time. The detail offered will enable you to identify which areas to focus on, and how effective your online marketing spend is.

Review your performance

Once you implemented some changes, ensure you go back and measure how successful they have been. You’ll need to constantly improve, measure, amend, review. In this way you will slowly start affecting the overall conversion on your site. So, constantly test new copy, new keywords, new titles, then measure and learn from your tests. The most important thing is to only make one change at a time, otherwise you will never know what has actually impacted your conversion.

Basics of search engine optimisation

Rexino — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 09:45:07 +0000

Search engine optimisation is all about making sure that your site is optimised so that it ranks highly in search engines. Search engines are constantly trying to match the best content to the keywords the customer is searching for. In this article we discuss some of the changes you can make to your site to ensure you rank at the top of the search engine results (SERPS).Search engines want to provide the most relevant content. They do this using complex algorithms that take into account hundreds of criteria to generate a prioritised list of results. The criteria can be divided into “on-page” and “off-page” criteria.

On page criteria

On-page criteria refer to all those aspects you control directly as they are on your website.

Use a domain and URL that reflect the keywords you are trying to target
Avoid using flash, tables. This prevents search engines from accessing your pages
Use keyword-rich links to the page within the site. Google and other search engines will know what the page is about even before they get there
Add your page to the sitemap, and upload your sitemap to the search engines
Use only one header tag (H1), and ensure this reflect the keyword you are targeting
Add your keyword to title tag, mata description, meta keywords, at the top of the page
Optimise the keyword density on your page

Off page criteria

Search engines give very high importance to the quantity and quality of links to your site. Every link is considered a vote, and more votes you have the higher the ranking in search engines. Again, it’s all down to relevance - search engines assume that if you have a lot of sites linking to you, then your site must be worth while visiting. The main off-page criteria are therefore:

the number of sites linking to your site
the quality of the sites linking to yours
the description of the link - try to have relevant keywords in the links to your site

Top 5 keyword research tips

Rexino — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 22:15:50 +0000

Keyword research is one of the most important processes for search engine optimisation. Here is a list of our top five keyword research tips:

1. What is your website all about

The first step to keyword research has nothing to do with keywords - it’s all about your strategy. Why is your site different from any other, what have you got to offer that is special or different, what do you think your visitors are looking for?

First of all start writing down the top three or four area that you believe your website is all about. Avoid generic keywords. If you are an accountant for example, don’t just write down ”accountant”. You are very unlikely to be able to compete effectively for this keyword, and your potential customers are unlikely to search on these generic keywords anyway. In this case, you could write down the following keywords: “accoutants in Twickenham”, “affordable accountant”. You also specialise in small business and tax planning, so you also write down “small business accountants” and “tax planning”.

2. Find potential keywords from competitors

The next step is to type the keywords you just identified in Google, one at a time, and note the top 5 websites for each keyword. Obviously, if these sites rank highly they must be doing something right, so start learning what makes Google tick. Look at the keywords used by these sites, and add these keywords to your list, under the area identified in the previous step.

3. Keyword research tools

My favourite keyword research tools are:
Google suggest
Overture keyword selector tool
Wordtracker
Trellian Keyword Discovery Tool
Google AdWords Keyword Tool

Using these tools, you will have now generated huge amount of keywords under each area. These keywords include what you think the site is about, the keywords your competitors are using and a list of top keywords your potential customers are searching for.

4. Finalise your list

Select the list of final keywords by identifying the ones that are more profitable, removing rhe keywords you are unlikely to be competing on or the ones for which there is too much competition. You shouls also consider the volumes of searches performed for each keyword you wish to optimise your site for.

5. Optimise your site

The final step is to optimise your site for the keywords you have identified. For each keyword you should create a separate page, and add the keyword in the URL (domain and filename), the title, the meta keywords and meta description, the headings (H1-H6), the first sentence of first paragraph, in text links. This will give Google and other search engines a very strong indication on what your page is all about, and should rank your page higher in the search engine results (SERPS).