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

How to make your web presence recession proof

Or tips for free online marketing. 

On Tuesday I attended a training seminar run by the Thames Valley Enterprise Hub at Sage House in Reading. The £35 (inc lunch) seminar covered basic search engine optimisation (SEO) including keyword research, where to use these keywords, using RSS feeds and blogs, free analysis tools, inbound linking strategies and social networking for business.

I'll cover briefly cover each of these to give you an overview of the content of the seminar (mainly as a vehicle to confirm my understanding and help me decide next steps). I'd also liek to thanks Stephen Murphy of Tennis Jeannie, Michelle Paice of Connection2 and Freddie Jones of Flat Rock Technology for their help and ideas on both marketing and pricing strategy.  

Anyway, back to the seminar which was led by Tony Treacy or eConsultants.it. 

The basic theme of the seminar revolved around using free online tools to market your website rather than paying for online advertising. So out with pay per click, banners ads and email campaigns and in with social networks, SEO and clever use of content. 

See the following posts for the next steps

Moo Cards and alocalprinter

Just a quick note to highlight a funky business card site I've found - www.moo.com.

Rather than the same old card, one side is your standard contact details (a simple online form) then you stick a picture on the back. You can choose from existing designs or upload your own, I took a few screen shots from our new website (some with a list of our services, others just with a bit of branding). 

Two sided, full colour cards cost £10.99 for 50 (picture on the back, reversed colour front). I also ordered their half height mini cards which fit into a keyring sized holder so I've always got some with me. Ordered on Friday 24th Oct, arrived Wednesday 29th. 

I've also ordered some bulk traditional business cards from www.alocalprinter.com. 250 two sided full colour on recycled card for £39. I've used these guys before, a good quality product and a professional company. 

Writing copy

Dyslexia, what a wonderful word to spell. 

While I love reading, writing has always been a challenge for me (another reason for this blog, something to force me to practice). For Open Your Diary I've got to produce both promotional copy (a few example case studies) and some help text to guide users if they get a little lost. 

I've been struggling to write this copy for ages, always putting it off with excuses and more important things to do. It has come to the point where I'm fed up with this task hanging over me, so I've going to bash it out. 

I then realised that I'd been worrying unnecessarily, I'm writing for the web not for hard copy. If I get it wrong, yes it is embarrassing and may cost me a little business on that day, but it's a web page, I can change it in seconds. It is costing me more not to have no copy up than it is to have just a brief set of notes up (within reason). 

One technique I've found that helps is to write a few bullet points and gradually turn these into sentences rather than struggling to leap strait in. I'll also get MrsAlex to cast an eye over the site as she has a talent (one of many) for proof reading. 

One tool I've found helpful for writing technical docs is Scrivener. This writing app works on the basis that you jot a few notes on a post card for each piece of text and then gradully fill in a little more detail. It has a range of views, a split screen so you can see your notes and your proper copy at the same time. You can also drag and drop cards, sections and whole chapters to rearrange your text. It also has some customisable meta data to help tick off completed sections etc. Although it was designed for writers, its the perfect tool for user stories in XP extreme programming. 

Online ads - trying it out

Well we are trying a few different online paid advertising sites out, here is a quick list:

Search engines

Facebook Social Ads

Google Adwords

Yahoo advertising

MSN / Live Search

Forums

As we are looking to promote to small UK businesses. we are trying a banner ad (£15 a month) on www.UKBusinessLabs.co.uk and we are in the process of trying to do the same on a couple of other small business forums. 

At the moment we only have a holding site up, but we've had 20 businesses sign up. At the end of this month I'm going to write to these businesses with an update and a quick survey to see why they chose to sign up and what services they are looking for (what their business need is).  I was planning to try www.surveymonkey.com as I've been on the receiving end of a couple of surveys using this system it is seemed to work smoothly. 

How to build more traffic to new business website - link exchanges

How to build more traffic to new business website - link exchanges

As far as I've read, one of the best ways to improve your Google ranking is to be linked to from other sites that already have a high ranking.

There are a number of comemrcial services that offer to improve your ranking by creating links from other sites to yours. These can be links from appropriate sites but often they are from sites set up to provide link backs (so are ranked low by Google) or your url is submitted as a comment on forums and blogs. Often these forum and blog posts get treated as spam so the reputation of your site may be tarnished, so be cautious.

If you plan to do a little link building yourself there are a few simple steps that may help:

1. Create a links page on your site
   
2. Search for other non-competing websites that rank highly with key words that you think are important. Add a link to these sites on your link page. 
   
3. Write (once) to the webmaster of each site asking for a link to your site, giving the link and text you would like them to use and providing them with the link to your links page displaying their link
   

Development methodology - lean

How are we developing Open Your Diary? 

We are keeping it lean.

As we are self funded, we don't have massive amounts of cash to blow so by necessity we have to keep a very tight reign on costs. 

For a start we have a core development team of four, myself as consultant and PM, Dmitry and AlexP as developers and Slava on design. We bring in help where appropriate Yori for iPhone development, AlexL for templates and accessibility, Jules for security, but we try to keep a tight focused development group to reduce communication overheads. 

We are using proven open source technology for the delivery platform - Linux and Ruby on Rails as well as using low cost virtual machines - www.rimuhosting.com for both our test and production servers. 

We are also trying to keep the application itself lean, keeping just the core features needed rather than adding everything Microsoft word style. This is proving to be a bit of a challenge as we have lots of things we'd like to offer our customers, lots of ways to edit and change things, but we also need to keep the app simple to use and easy (and cheap) to develop and maintain.

For a little inspiration, take a look at the book Getting Real by the guys at 37 Signals.

Counting down to launch

After reviewing progress to date, we should have the main release 1 functionality finished for internal review by the end of this month (well we believe in some of the Agile methodology, so we review working code daily) so we can then open it up to our beta testing team. It's all getting very exciting and we should hopefully be ready to launch by the end of November. 

Referral marketing

OK, so we all prefer to buy off a business someone has recommended to you. The second opinion counts, be it from a friend, a business acquaintance or a consumer review from Which? We all like to be told what is good without having to go to the bother of investigating it ourselves and possibility investing resources (buying a meal) and getting stung. Amazon has used this to great effect with consumer reviews (even if some of them are now obviously corporate shills). 

We are considering (in a later release, we need to ship our initial product first) adding consumer reviews to the directory part of www.OpenYourDiary.com but for this post I just want to ask a simple question. 

How can we generate referrals for a business that has not yet launched or is very new so does not have many customers. 

On the website itself we are writing generic case studies of how owners of different types of business can use the various features of OYD to make their life easier and business more profitable. 

We can ask friends to create links from their websites and post links on forums etc. We could also provide items (business cards, pens etc) that refer to our site and spread these about (this is likely to be too expensive for us). 

Should we concoct a press release?

Any ideas?

Online Ads

Well, as we have a holding site up and running I thought we should do a little test marketing with a few Google, Live and Facebook ads. 

Wow! 

While the Google and Live ads did very little, Facebook ads set up with the same parameters generated far more  clicks and conversions (OK, 11 but for a spend of only $3) . The impression to click ratio on all of these is very low, but as we don't pay for impressions, this is not an issue at the moment. However, for every three people clicking through (someone clicking on an advert) we are getting a sign up on the holding site. In contrast, for the Google ads, we are getting fewer clicks and no sign ups yet.

We'll continue to monitor the performance of these ads.

Pricing - What should I sell at?

Well I've had three pieces of advice on pricing and I'm trying to pull these together into a pricing structure that will allow me to charge a low price (I'm trying to serve micro businesses that have little free capital) but make enough money to fund the development of the business. 

Our initial idea was to charge nothing for the users to set up their service, so reducing the barriers to adopting the service, and to charge a reasonable fee per booking request accepted, so the businesses only have to pay if they have work coming in. The level of this fee was our first question. What is reasonable? 49p (high?), 9p (not enough to make money on initial low volumes). 

To expand on this we could look at an augmented product model, provide the core product at a low price and then provide additional services, at an additional cost banking on the fact that users will take enough of these to make an income.

Paul Mabbott from Jennings was keen that I look at a value pricing model. Look at the value that my core product and ancillay services provide to the customer (providers) and look to set a price on this basis rather than just a cost plus margin model. Putting emphasis on perceived value but still considering the cost of providing the service (we are a self funded business so cannot afford huge loss leaders) and the market sensitivity (what are our competitors charging). Paul advised against giving too much away for free as you are just robbing yourself of margin. The example he used was the prebuilt business templates I was planning to give away for free to help set up for less technical users. Paul suggested that as these provide value to the customer, try charging a small additional fee for these.

DHH at 37 Signals in the Getting Real book (read it) talks about giving part of your product away for free to attract customers than charging more for additional features. The pricing seminar run by Thames Valley Enterprise talked about a variation of this, a Goldilocks pricing model. Have a small cheap product with some basic features so you can say you have a cheap product (Vista home basic), an expensive all singing and dancing version (enterprise) and then a middle product (just right - vista home premium) that you want people to buy.

So the first pricing model we are going to try is to have three products:

• Basic, which provides the core booking engine with a basic website and email notifications (should we limit the number of bookings per month?). 
  
• Professional which provides the basic service plus templates and SMS notifications
  
• Enterprise which is Pro plus the customer growth tools (CRM for small businesses)

I'd like to be able to give the basic version away for free but what do we include in this service to make it attractive enough to try but limited enough to encourage people to upgrade if they are making the use of the service. Ideally I'd like to charge for every appointment placed (so we are making some money to cover the basic costs of providing the service) but it does make it harder to call the product free. 

Business Mentoring

Well I've just got back from my first business mentoring session with Paul Maboutt of www.jennings.co.uk and it was an unbelievably positive and helpful session. While I've got a range of business experience and have done a little studying, a fresh perspective and some local knowledge was great for prioritising next steps. 

Paul and his partner run a number of business parks around Oxfordshire offering services from stand alone premisses to quick get out managed offices and home support packages. As they have an interest in growing small businesses they spend some of their time helping start ups with some initial help and advice. 

So what did we cover:

• Business Planning
• Pricing
• Market Research
• Support Organisations
• Selling - Solution Selling
• Networking Events
  

I'll cover these topics in some detail in later posts.

Blogging for promotion and search engine rankings

Blogging seems to be the thing to do to promote your new business and improve your search engine rankings. 

• Blogs are quick to produce (most have prebuilt templates)
  
• It's easy to add new content from anywhere (most have a browser client)
• Free blog sites (such as this one) make this a cheap way to advertise
• You can add links to your website, so helping your google rankings.

See www.theEventThing.com and www.OpenYourDiary.com our first two products.