We've moved to wordpress

We've moved to the wordpress site as it offers a few more tools that make publishing this blog about out online appointment booking system a little easier.

See http://OpenYourDiary.wordpress.com/ or follow us on twitter at http://twitter.com/OpenYourDiary.

rgds/alex

Email marketing

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours sending direct email to potential customers with two aims, to gain more knowledge about their ideas and to see if any of them would sign up.

As this was a first stab, rather than going after our key segment I thought I'd try asking members of a secondary market what they though of the site (rather than going for a hard sell).

Did it work? Well of the 56 emails I sent, I've so far had three replies with helpful comments and suggestions but no sign ups. I've also had an extra 50 hits (compared to the day before) on the website (measured using google analytics).

As a quick thank you to those who replied, here are a few links, Ethereal Events, Paul Deacon and Plans and Presents.

Twitter: Open Your Diary

Well like everyone else I've decided to try twitter as a way of promoting my business, see OpenYourDiary as the user ID. I'm a little concerned that I'll spend more time reading than promoting.

We've got our first sign up and they like us

Well, we've had our first business sign up to OpenYourDiary and in a rather excited manner we could not help but write to them and ask what they thought about the sign up process, getting services set up and linking to the booking forms.

They like us and have made a couple of suggestions as to how we can improve the booking interface, the main suggestion being adding the ability to add a question / form field specific to each service.

We've gone beta!!!

We've done it, we've launched the first version of OpenYourDiary.com to the main production webservers. We are both very excited and rather nervous.

We've designed and tested the application ourselves but it is only when software goes into the wild do we find out if what we have built is what our (potential) customers want and need for their business. We'll also be exposed to the black hats so we'll discover if we've made the gates strong enough.

Using your keywords

So where do you use your keywords?

Page title - This is the "title" tag in the head section of your html page. The text you enter here is used by google as the headline for the link to your site, it is displayed at the top of your browser when viewing a page and is the default text used when you bookmark a page. Limit your text to 65 characters (in spaces) or less. Ideally use different titles / keywords across your site for better google performance. For example we will add Hairdresser on our landing page for hairdressers but use MOT, Garage and Service on our landing page for garages. 

URL - Try to include 1-2 of your keywords in your page URLs, this can be both in the domain name and within the directory structure and file names. e.g. if we wanted to target "diary", "appointments" and "hairdressers" we could try something like www.OpenYourDiary.com/Appointments/Hairdresser.html 

Page description - Although this is not used by all search engines for ranking, the meta tag description is almost universally used on search engine results pages as the summary displayed to the user. Limit your text to 160 characters or less but make sure you include 2-3 of your key words/phrases. 

Page keywords - Again, this meta tag is not used by all search engines but adding it will no harm. Most SEO experts suggest 7-10 keywords but 2 targeted words per page may be a better bet. Don't include lots of keywords as some search engines will see this as spamming and penalise you accordingly.  

Page content - Try to sensibly use one or two of your keywords in the first paragraph of each page. 

Keyword Optimisation

The first step in the SEO process revolved around the researching keywords to target, finding out what people are searching for on the main search engines and then making sure your site is optimised to provide pages that will feature these. 

As Google takes 80% of the search traffic and the top three links in google search results get 75% of the click through, our goal is to be in this top 3 on google. To do this, we are going to look for search terms in which we can build our presence in these results. 

1) Generate some relevant search terms

Think of a search phrase or search term that defines your product offering or the goal of your site.  Now type this onto the google keyword tool to get suggested keywords and the associated stats. These results provide you with a list of relevant (in Google's eyes) and the number of searches carried out using these search terms. Save these results to your favourite spread sheet programme by clicking on the link (.csv) at the bottom right of the results table. 

2) Cull the list

First of all we are only interested in the keywords and the search volume, so delete the other columns. The we want to get rid of any keywords that are obviously not related to our site, the google software may think they are relevant but as a human we know they are not. Go ahead and delete the irrelevant words. 

3) Research the competition

Now we have our list of relevant keywords we need to decide which ones are worth targeting. We are going to try the low hanging fruit but this stage is rather long and tedious, so make yourself a cup of tea first. 

For each of the keywords, type it into google and record the number of matching pages in a new column in your spreadsheet. For example "Open Your Diary" has 2 million matching pages. 

Now divide the number of searches (average search volume) by the number of matching pages and express this as a percentage. Order by this new column.  

We now have an idea of both what people are searching for (the search volume) and the amount of competition (the number of results), so the ratio we've created helps us identify which terms we stand a better chance of appearing high in the search results. We'll pick 7-10 of these. 

4) The real competition

If you have a little more time, you can identify the real competition by using the search terms along with a couple of google commands (some extra text you add to the search to filter the results).  As google uses the presence of the keyword in the URL and in the page title to help build its results list, we can check the performance of the keywords within these with allintitle: and allinURL:. Try allintitle: Open Your Diary

With these you can build a similar ratios to see which of the keywords is worth competing on (which terms are searched for, but for which there are few competitors). 

5) Using your keywords

See the next post