Since opening its doors in 2006, Moocow have been working hard growing and developing our client base & expertise, offering a dynamic blend of creative thinking, experience and technical know-how. Here at Moocow we are dedicated to helping you get the best out of your website. We are proud to have produced amazing websites for our clients that boosted their brand and helped their businesses blossom. With these 7 simple tips we can help you be well on the way to efficiently marketing your website in as quick as 30 minutes.
1. Pick the right domain name
Making sure your website has a relevant URL is the first thing that stands out about your business. When clients go to search for you, they want a domain name that’s easy to understand and quick to search. It’s vital to pick this out before your website goes live, if you’re part of a company or brand it’s best to stick with whatever your company name is or at least a keyword or name that is relevant to your business. This is also the first place Google goes to determine exactly what your site’s about before choosing how to rank it. Make sure not to include any special characters/hashtags and remember to make your domain stand out from the crowd.
2. Create page titles and descriptions that help get you recognised
When creating a website, we will ask you to supply chosen titles for each of your web pages and a brief description of what that page includes. If you’re unsure of the importance of page titles and what exactly it is they do, hover on an open tab in your web browser and it will show you what title that page shows up as in search engines. The same goes for your page description – although you can’t see this personally, Google uses this description to filter down what your page is about. When your site is finalised and is picked up by Google, your page title and description is what viewers will first see when searching for relevant interests, so they will immediately know whether your page is something they are interested in or not – this is why it’s vital to make your page titles and descriptions relevant to your business.
3. Design your website around keywords
Keywords are important to your website as this is how Google directs searchers to your site when looking for similar interests. Picking keywords for your specific industry is helpful in putting you on the map and getting you the right attention. You can use free programs like Google AdWords to help you understand how and why keywords are important to your business. Use their Keyword Planner to access suggestions for keywords related to your business, helping your company reach the customer audience you’re looking for. AdWords also offers other options and extras you can pay for to give your site an extra boost such as graphic display ads, YouTube video ads or in-app mobile ads, so you have plenty of choice in how to reach out to your target audience.
4. Add text to your images
In the same way as mentioned above, picking keywords relating to your site is super handy for when customers want to search for you. This also works with images. Any image that you’re choosing to upload to your site, be sure to add a few words about each image that both describe the picture and are catchy to your search engines. Remember to always pick the right file name for your image and reduce file size for faster loading. Google states that the main reason a searcher leaves a web page before viewing the whole site is due to pages taking too long to load, which is often due to image files being too large to load quickly.
5. Anchor text can be helpful in guiding viewers around your site
A popular tip to get your website more noticed is adding anchor text to a page. Anchor text is where you click on a section of text highlighted in a ‘hyperlink’ or button that takes you directly to another page on your site or link to any other page on the web. It’s useful to use a short phrase or keyword relating to the subject of the page. It’s also helpful to choose words that are popular to your business or industry and are regularly picked up by Google. Despite being a clever trick to boost SEO, some sites go overboard with this however, which is something to avoid. Over use of linking can show up as a red flag on Google.
6. Get advertising through Google
If you want to maximise your chances of getting your business showing up in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) it’s a good idea to promote your brand on Google owned sites such as YouTube and Google Maps. Google pushes far more traffic towards websites that they own, so this will be an advantage for your company. A particular ‘must have’ for your business is setting up a profile on Google My Business. If you’re unsure what this is, this is the selection of info that pops up as a square in the right hand corner of your Google search on the web browser that shows the name of your business, photos, contact details and reviews. If your business has a lot of video related content that you use to promote your products or brand, setting up a YouTube channel can also add a large amount of viewers to both your website and help promote your products.
7. Mobile first sites are always top
Mobile-first responsive web design is now becoming a mandatory requirement for most sites. Over the last couple of years, there’s been a giant leap in what we call ‘internet browsing behaviour’, with thousands of people swapping from desktop to mobile technology. Google now gives preference to mobile friendly sites, prioritising mobile sites over desktops, and by the end of 2018 it’s predicted that 70% per cent of online shopping traffic will be mobile. Google’s Webmaster Blog stated “our algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a site’s content to rank pages from that site, to understand structured data, and to show snippets from those pages in our results.”