..so we what have we done to the website so far?
Firstly I was not very happy with the domain hosting the site was receiving (interhost.co.uk) they managed to implement an upgrade to their servers without telling me and managed to break part of the site. Despite numerous attempts to communicate with them they summarily ignored me. I therefore cut my losses with them and moved to Heart Internet (www.heartinternet.co.uk). They have been very responsive and helpful and made the transfer of the domain easy. Domain hosting (including this blog) costs £11.39 (including UK Vat) per month. They can also help you purchase a domain name if you don’t alrady have one. This is important as your domain name (example.co.uk) can have a major influence on the traffic which eventually gets to your site. The search engines take this into account when ranking your site.
In order to design the new site, I purchased Microsoft Expression Web (£119) this is fairly simple to pick up and also comes with a good selection of web site templates. There are other cheaper web page design options – for example Serif WebPlus (http://www.serif.com/web-design-software/) which is free. Regardless of how you approach the design of your web site, I recommend you get to understand a little about HTML. This is the programming language of web pges and it makes it easier to adapt your web pages and blog if you can at least make minor adjustments via HTML. There is a good HTML tutorial site here: http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp.
I was readily able to adapt one of the Expression Web templates for the new site. I started the redesign at the beginning of November 2010 with a view to the new site going live on 1st January 2011. The redesign went reasonably well, and we published the new site on schedule. The results of these labours can be found here: www.human-resource-solutions.co.uk . The site contains loads of free HR resources for small and medium sized businesses, especially a large number of free HR policies and procedures, a staff handbook template, a policy manual template and loads of other free policies and links. I think it is a major improvement over the old site, especially as all the information has also been brought bang up-to-date.
No point having a website if people can’t find it!
There is a ton of stuff out there on optimising your website to ensure it is picked up and ranked highly by the search engines – which is how the vast majority if people find a website (the others being a link from another site, or coming directly to your site by typing your address in their web browser). The objective is to get your website onto one of the first three pages of a search return (and preferably the first page!), and especially onto Google which is easily the biggest search engine – it accounts for 65% of all searches conducted (see Comscore research here).
It is vital to get on to one of the first 3 pages of a search return as Google research has shown that most people don’t go beyond the third page of a search return. If they don’t find what they want they tend to re-frame their query and start again, or give up.
I decided to just focus on optimising for Google on the basis that the other search engines are very similar and so the optimisation for Google would also impact positively on the others. Google do a search engine optimization Starter Guide which is helpful.
How the site was optimised for Search Engines (..especially Google!)
In all the research we did on this, the main areas we needed to focus on were: Keywords and Metatags. Optimising these should help us to ensure that the major search engines picked up the site and gave a good search return in the first few pages. Ha – if it was only that easy! Anyway this is what we did…
Keywords
These are the words which when typed into a search engine will deliver a search result to the user. So for example if they type in “human resource solutions” or “Whistleblowing Policy” we would want to be in the first page or so of the search return. Therefore it is important that we optimised the site to contain certain keywords such that when the user typed in these words, Google was likely to return our site in its listings. This was not easy, because as you would expect there are lots of web sites out there competing for the same keywords – obviously they can’t all be in the top returns. To do this effectively you really need some help in deciding which keywords you should focus on. There is a fair bit of software out there to help with this – most of which is trying to extricate as much dosh from you as possible!However you can sign up for some free trials to get started – such as with WebCEO (www.webceo.com) or Wordtracker (www.Wordtracker.com). However the Google tool is free and very simple and easy to use and is what we used to identify those keywords and phrases which were most likely to lead to traffic. The tool is here: https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal.
To use it you simply type in the key words which you think are most relevant to your site. In our case we used such things as: “free HR Policies”, “staff handbook template”, “whistleblowing policy” etc. The returns in the google tool allowed us to ascertain how popular these keywords / phrases were in terms of how often they were searched for per month, and also how much competition there was for these words. We targetted words / phrases where there was a reasonable number of searches per month, but where the competition was not too high. The idea is to utilise these key words in the relevant pages in your web site. In this way the search engine will pick them up when it examines your site. The keywords / phrases should also be inserted into the relevant metatags – but more about that in the next post…
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