Using Free Google Tools To Analyse Your Website’s Performance
If your business has a website it was almost certainly designed to generate you leads and sell your products or services.
Google offers free tools to help you manage your website and help improve its performance in the search engines.
The main two are Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools.
Simply sign up for a free Google account and you can then access these useful tools from the one place.
Firstly, add Analytics. To do this you must verify that you are the owner of the site – this requires you to add some code to the home page of your site. Once Google sees the code in place it will allow you access to the data.
The code allows the search engine to collect lots of useful information such as how many people visit your site, where they come from, what content is the most popular and more.
You can generate reports whenever you want to and you can compare how well your website is doing compared to the previous month or the equivalent month in the previous year. This allows you to tell if your online business is moving in the right direction.
You can also see the words that people typed in to the search engines to find you. This can highlight areas to work on. If, for example, lots of people are coming to your site for a certain product, you can work even harder to promote that product and get even more people to your site – it’s obviously working for you. If on the other hand you expect lots of people to find your site for a product, but when you check out the data you find out that they are not, it can prompt you to do something about it – either promote the product more or divert attention to a better performing product.
One of the great things about Analytics is that it allows you to track how many conversions you are getting. A conversion is simply an action that you deem valuable, such as completing an online sale (reaching the thank-you page following a purchase) or signing up for a newsletter. It allows you to visualise the number of people starting off the purchase process and where they drop out of the sales funnel. This can tell you how effective your website is and flag where you could make changes.
If you have the Analytics code on your website, you can also enable Webmaster Tools. This allows you see how Google sees your website. It can flag up any problem that the spiders have in crawling your site. It also flags any issues with your site such as duplicate or missing meta tags. The meta tags help tell Google what a page is about and so it pays to be alerted when there are issues.
If you have gone to the effort to get your website designed and created in the first place, it doesn’t pay to just leave it and blindly hope that it is doing the right things for you.
Of course there are other tools that will provide similar data, but Google provides these tools for free, they work well and they are industry standard so it seems a bit silly to choose another.
Giant Peach Web Design Salisbury
Bowood Estate websites re-designed and launched by Giant Peach
New sites designed by Giant Peach web design Salisbury
Why SEO Is An Important Part Of Web Design
Good web design is important to make a site that is attractive to visitors and one that works properly.
Whilst designers are good at looking at the aesthetics and navigation of a site, not every web designer will be aware of SEO or how to use it with their design. If you are looking for a web design company that use SEO instead of just searching for something like ‘web design Salisbury’ try also looking for ‘SEO web design Salisbury’.
It is important for every website to be ranked well in the search engines because it is the search engines that send the largest percentage of visitors to most sites. Also, when the majority of people are looking for services or products online they turn to a search engine to find them the sites that best match their query.
To rank well in a search engine your site needs to be optimised properly. This is what you will be paying for if you hire a company to do search engine optimisation (SEO). Whilst you can do SEO on a site that has already been built, it helps if the SEO considerations are taken into account at the design stage.
There are many ways to optimise a site and a few are mentioned below.
It is important to use the correct meta tags for a page. The meta tags are the title tag, description tag and alt tags. The title tag is the one that shows as the tab name at the top of the web page. It should be succinct, unique and describe the page - not the entire website. The description tag is important to encourage people to click through to the site. Again it needs to be succinct, unique and descriptive of the page. The alt tag is the alternative words for an image. They should describe the image e.g. ‘solid oak wardrobe’ rather than use the name the camera gave it e.g. IMG001.
Designers also sometimes overlook content in the form of text. The text informs the search engines what the page is about and gives it some substance. Content must be unique and preferably a few hundred words long.
Search engines like an XML sitemap to tell them what URLs belong to the site. It is like the sitemap for humans except it is in web code. Usually they can be found if you type in /sitemap.xml at the end of the domain name.
Often, designers will simply put your site live and that’s it. However, when the site goes live, you will need all other versions of your site pointing to the one you want as your main one. This means that if you have a .com and .co.uk version of your site, you should choose the best one and put in place a 301 redirect from the other one. A 301 redirect will tell a search engine that the page it was looking for has permanently moved to a new location and any humans that land on the page will be redirected to the new page. Any links that were pointing to the old page will pass on their value to the new page.
If you are using a web designer, make sure that they have a basic understanding of SEO and make sure you know who is going to be responsible for actions such as redirects.
The sooner you get your site optimised the quicker it can start to rank well in the search engines.
Curious Fred: Some Potential Pitfalls For Web Designers
Web design is the creation of web pages using coding languages. You may think that the design process would be similar to designing for print but the way that people experience a website is different - they can come in at any page and will scan for information. Web users are very goal driven and…
Web Design Tutorials
A handful of useful tutorials from various areas of code that designers should have their hands in.
You can have information and ease of use and have artistic integrity at the same time. The art of being a good Web designer is getting yourself into that middle ground and treating it as a final destination instead of as a compromise.
Web users ultimately want to get at data quickly and easily. They don’t care as much about attractive sites and pretty design.
Search Engine Friendly Web Design and Marketing
Search engine friendly web design may not be a term you have ever come across before but it is something you should be aware of.
The majority of users on the internet use a search engine to learn about products and services and if your website is not search engine friendly it will not be displayed in the first pages of results.
There are elements of the design of a site that make it search engine friendly and you should make sure that your web designer is fully aware of them. These include things such as not having frames (because information in them can’t be read by search engine spiders/bots) and not having too many internal and external links on a page (restrict it to under 100). There should also be plenty of words on a web page because images don’t tell Google and Bing etc enough about what your page is relating to. Because they give results based on relevance to a user’s search query, they have to know what your site is about.
If the web design is working against you, you don’t have much hope of online success.
Once you have a site that can easily be crawled and indexed by the search engine spiders/bots, you will start to find you are listed in the results pages when internet users type in a query that the topic of your site. Bear in mind that there are many thousands of pages of returned results and most users only look at the first few. If your site is languishing in position 700, the chances are that no-one will find you so you must market your site.
You can market your site both online and off because both these methods will help with awareness of your site and your services/products. When advertising in print or on TV or radio, don’t forget to mention your website URL.
Online adverting is usually aimed towards Google because it is the most significant search engine and there are two marketing strategies you can employ to have a presence on it.
The first is by signing up for Google AdWords (often referred to as PPC or pay-per-click advertising). Using PPC, you pay to have an advert appear on the site (payment is only due when a user actually clicks on your advert). It is a good method to make sure your site appears quickly on Google, but the drawback is that as soon as your budget runs out, your adverts cease showing and so you instantly lose that online visibility. AdWords is easy to use but needs plenty of background reading to get the most out of it.
A longer term strategy is search engine optimisation (SEO). It involves evaluating and improving on and off-site factors to promote a site in the search engines. The aim is to get your site ranking well in the natural search results (rather than the paid sections where you would show in AdWords). Web users tend to trust the organic results more, simply because they’re not paid-for. Organic search result rankings are determined by Google’s secret algorithm of around 200 factors. It should be noted that AdWords use doesn’t have any bearing on natural search results so you do not have to use AdWords to do well in Google’s organic listings.
If you have the funds, it is a good idea to use both AdWords and search engine optimisation to improve your online visibility and brand awareness. If possible you should use a specialist marketing company because their knowledge will lead to a more effective campaign and keep you away from potential pitfalls such as having your site de-listed by Google for using unethical SEO techniques, or wasting your AdWords budget because you didn’t utilise negative keywords.
You may discover that your web design company is able to offer marketing services too which will be useful to you because the whole build and marketing of your site can be kept within one company. Because the best results come from a partnership, and your web design company will already know you and your company well, this may be your most useful option.
Whatever approach you take with your website design and marketing, remember to keep the search engines, especially Google, in the forefront of your mind.
Giant Peach web design Salisbury
