www.golftravel.co.za

We are pleased to have launched a new website www.golftravel.co.za for the Golf Travel Company.

The Golf Travel Company specialises in outbound Golf Tours to various destinations around the world, from St Andrews in Scotland, through to less known destination such as Egypt and Turkey.

Macadams International Website Launch

We are pleased to have successfully launched the Macadams International website this week. The site has been performing extremely well so far with  visitors from over 38 countries visiting the website within the first 3 days of the launch. 

Please visit the new website at www.macadams.co.za

Finding Unique Ways to Connect with your Target Market.

The Internet presents endless opportunities to grow businesses. While some enterprises are clearly better suited for online business than others, I am a firm believer that any business can use the web to generate more business.

Building a website is really the starting point for capitalising on online business. To make a successful initiative, it requires a well constructed and managed marketing campaign. This involves the development of an online marketing campaign and the possibility of merging the campaign with some real world marketing.

But what really makes some sites more successful than others is the ability to present your products to customers in an innovative and problem solving format.

Identify your target market and try determine an effective and unique way of connecting with them.

A successful example of this approach was implemented by a popular stationery company in the United States. They realised that one of the greatest barriers for an employee ordering new stationery was the administrative hassle factor of obtaining the necessary internal approvals. To simplify the ordering process the stationery company designed an online system that allowed an employee to login to a website and order any stationery that they require. The smart bit being that as soon as their order was placed, the system automatically requested all the internal approvals from the various departments within the company before finalising the order. No Hassle or Fuss.

Besides the ease of ordering, the system was so effective that the stationery provider become the de facto supplier for most companies set-up on the system. Why? Because ordering with any other company just seemed too lengthily and complicated. Not only had they successfully created a new mechanism for ordering but they secured their relationship with their clients.

Web Design: Understanding Your Clients Customers

How various businesses connect with new customers in a sector is a fascinating subject and something I find myself discussing at almost every opportunity with business owners. While I am often a little surprised by the first results, they are all consistently obvious after some short analysis. Typical Hindsight Clarity!

Since my experience is mostly in Real Estate I can provide an example here. While almost all brokers, leasing agents or developers have websites to provide details on the properties they offer, typically over 70 % of enquiries that they receive are generated from “For Sale “or “To Let” signage on properties.

Why? Because it is very difficult for a website to compete with buyers' natural senses (Sight, Smell & Touch specifically) and of course that unbiased neighbourhood information they obtain by driving through an area.

So why mention this on a website development blog? I see it as an illustration of the importance of understanding buyer behaviour in a particular industry when creating websites that service a sector. In my opinion, a website should be built to support existing buyer behaviour as opposed to trying to revolutionize an industry with a complete rethink on how buyers and sellers could interact. Generally this approach has a far higher success rate, without discounting the importance of business model innovation.

To illustrate the point, websites are typically used by Estate Agents as a medium for communicating details on a property which would not be economically viable to include in a newspaper advertisement, or which is not practical to include on a signboard. This information could typically include the building plans, lease terms, zoning issues etc. This enables agents to direct potential buyers to a website where all the applicable information is presented in a structured format.

Understanding industry buyer behaviour is a natural role for a business owner. Being able to extract that wealth of information and utilize it to construct an effective website solution is the role of a good website developer.

Submitted on behalf of Nicholas Maunder

SEO: Balancing Quality Content with Keyword Density.

Writing website copy is one of the more strenuous processes for many entrepreneurs preparing to launch a website. As anyone with a little SEO knowledge should know, mentioning your selected keywords throughout the content (referred to as keyword density) is very important to ensure that you achieve a decent SERP (Search Engine Results Page) positioning.

So how does one maintain the quality of ones content while ensuring maximum exposure of ones keywords?

While many websites have strong keyword densities throughout their content, many webmasters seem very comfortable to trade off all those traditional copywriting principles qualities such as “Readability” and “Content Flow” for repetitive nonsensical keyword placement. I think this a awful approach to SEO!

It is often forgotten that we actually need to convert each website visitor into a buyer through persuasive content, which will reassure visitors that you are a reputable company, who has the correct product or service for their particular need. Also, writing natural content is much easier than overly keyword rich content, as it deals with issues that are well understood by someone in a particular line of business.

I would not be too concerned if your website keyword densities are slightly lower than your competitor’s website, so long as you offer high quality content which will attract readers who are really interested in what you have to say. I see quality content as being much more successful in driving visitors to your website and in retaining them once there.

This approach is an underlying principle in the Long Tail SEO strategy, (and if you agree with the principle it) is another reason to ensure all your website content is Natural.

How to know if your Website is beating the competition.

The recent launch of the Benchmarking service in Google Analytics is a major step forward in monitoring a website's performance and what I feel to be one of the most significant advancements for business owners in the area of website monitoring.

Ever wondered how your website is performing against the competition? Some of the most common question we are asked include:

1. Is my website successful when compared to others?
2. Are the users staying longer or shorter on my site when compare to my competitors?
3. What are the website users in my industry's normal pattern of behaviour?

These are huge questions with the smallest bit of insight into the answers revealing a great deal. So what is Benchmarking and how does it work in providing me with the answers to these questions?

Benchmarking is a feature which forms part of the Googles Analytics product. Analytics is a free service offered by Google to monitor your website traffic, and is by far one of the most powerful website traffic monitoring tools on the web today. Besides providing vast amounts of data on your users, when linked with other free Google products, the service becomes an very effective website performance evaluation tool. More information on analytics can be found on Wikipedia.

So what is Benchmarking?

Through the broad adoption of Analytics across various industry sectors, Google has been able to create the Benchmarking service which aims to share analytics data between website owners. Website owners have an opt in option to join the Analytics data sharing service which will add your website performance patterns in Analytics to the benchmark service. "Google will remove all identifiable information about your website, then combine that data with hundreds of other anonymous sites in comparable industries and report them in an aggregate form". Once opted in, you will have access to the benchmarking service which will provide you with industry yard sticks such as Length of Visits, Bounce Rate, Number of Page Views, Average time on set and New Visits.

In each instance the service will be able to tell you if you are ahead or behind in each metric. I have listed two examples from unrelated sites to demonstrate the end results.

A Poor Performance.

A Strong Showing.

These metrics are extremely powerful and although they provide some insight into the working of your site, interpreting the data is what will make the benchmark service valuable. Each website still has its own unique circumstance and this point should not be lost when reviewing the performance metrics.

Benchmarking was launch about 4 weeks ago and I believe that it will become a widely discussed topic on the web in the next few months. The biggest concern that any website owner and operator is whether anonymously sharing their performance data with a particular sector might be detrimental to their website in the long term. I am of the opinion that it would not, although with the service only being a few weeks old there is plenty of time for debate. Let's see how things unfold.

New Client | Fractional Places

Fractional Places is a Cape Town based company focused on developing and promoting fractional ownership property in South Africa.

Fractional Places offers fractional ownership products in the Western Cape with the intention of launching offshore projects within the first 6 months of launching the new website.

The website will showcase their fractional ownership portfolio and include a few unique features which we will reveal shortly. We look forward to the launch of the new website within the next few weeks (which will be viewable at http://www.fractionalplaces.com/) and wish them great success with their new projects.

Tanya

The New Kidorable SA Website | Coming Soon

We would like to welcome a new client http://www.kidorablesa.com/.

Kidorable specialise in the distribution of the Kidorable brand of childrens clothes in South Africa. The product range is extensive and will be presented in the new website which will be launched shortly.

The clothing line which Kidorable offers is truly unique and would be a treat in any childs wardrobe. We hope to complete the new website within the next few weeks. The new website will include a list of retailers which stock Kidorable products.

Tanya

Back from the United States.

I arrived back from my extended visit to the United States last week Thursday. While I have had a fantastic break, I am glad to back with some new energy to expend on my projects.

While the enquiries have piled up over the 3 ½ weeks I do still have some capacity for a few additional projects. Do not hesitate to contact me for a quotation or just to chat about a new project.

Tanya.

Why Use Googles Geographic Targeting Tool on your Website...

I recently discovered a new feature which has been added to Google’s Webmaster Tools called Geographic Targeting. The tool allows webmasters to specify their websites target market by providing fields where the webmaster can enter in the geographic location of their target market or audience. The fields allow you to specify the location right down to street level.

On face value there seems to be some obvious upside in targeting your website and thereby hopefully increasing your websites ranking in that regions SERP’s. But it was the potential downside that concerned me, in that it might reduce my website ranking to people outside of your targeted region (as people do occasional get enquiries from outside their main target region).

So I started to surf the web to find out more info on the actual workings of this tool. In typical Google style, the tool did not have a clear explanation of how it functioned and most of the explanations out on the web seemed rather cryptic. That was until I came across a posting from a chap by the name of John Mueller in one of Google’s Groups. He works for Google and has a pretty strong rating in the groups, so I think he knows what he is talking about. Here is what he had to say;- (Excuse the copying and pasting;-)

Specifying geotargeting information for a site will not diminish its value in other geographic regions. For example, should you decide to select "Germany" as your target market, it will not affect how your site is returned in search results outside of Germany.

So it seems that there is only a potential upside in using the tool. By extension, if two websites where servicing the same region and with all the other things being equal, except that one website was using the Geo-targeting tool, Geotargeting should push the one website higher up in the SERP’s than the one not using the service– right?

Well the upside for Google is clear here. They will be able to serve more relevant results in the various regions, with the webmasters carrot being the promise of better localised search results. In typical Google style it seems to be an obvious and brilliant thing to do. I’m looking forward to see webmasters comments on this service in the future and to see exactly how this tools as affect their SERP. The link to the Google Groups article where found this bit of info can be found HERE.

Any feedback on the performance of this feature would be appreciated.

New Clients | Web Design

It has been sometime since I have had the opportunity to update my blog. We have been really busy for the last few months and consequently I have fallen a little behind in doing my usual little punt for some of my new clients. There are a few more to add to this list which I will do a little closer to their project launch date.

Easy Gram www.easygram.co.za
We had the pleasure of redesign the new Easy Gram website which was launched a few weeks ago. Easy Gram services include Bulk SMS Services, Telegrams, Data cleaning and Tracing Services. For a full list of their services please visit their website.

Villa St. Simon www.bordeauxwinevilla.com
Villa St. Simon is a bed a breakfast in the heart of the French wine region. The bed & breakfast or Chambres d'hotes offers traditional french accommodation with unique access to many of the exclusive wine chateaus in the region. The strong focus on wine has attracted wine lovers from around the world including the occasional celebrity. Please visit the new website for more information which should be launching within the next 5 days.

Galvatech www.galvatech.co.za (Coming Soon)
Galvatech was founded in 1993 and provides services such as abrasive grit blasting, hot dip galvanising, industrial spray painting and zinc metal spraying. A complete list of their service will be available on their website shortly. Galvatech currently houses two of the largest blasting facilities in the Western Cape capable of handling items up to 20 tons and 18 meters in length.

Thanks to all the above clients for their ongoing support!

Launch of the New MultiFix.co.za Website.

We recently completed the development of the new http://www.multifix.co.za/ website. The scope of the project increased significantly as the project progressed with the new website finally being launched this week.

We wish Multifix even greater success with their new website and look forward to the opportunity work with them in the future.

Website Marketing Campaign Nett 19 000 Visitors in 48 Hours.

A recent website marketing campaign we developed has netted in excess of 19 000 unique users within 48 hours. At the peak of the campaign the target website was receiving a new user every 2 seconds. A fantastic result.

Well structured Traffic Driving campaigns are a very effective mechanism for generating huge amounts of traffic to your website. These campaigns have a varied Return on Investment depending on the type of business or service a company might offer.

Businesses that draw most of their clients from Europe and the United States, and where their website plays an integral part of the sales process are ideal candidates for this types of online marketing. While the traffic that one might receives is not of the same caliber as one would expect to generate through a SEM or Google AdWords Campaign, applying direct marketing response rates of anywhere between 0.5% to 1% and these campaigns start to look very achievable. This percentage applied to a traffic figure in excess of over 10 000 unique users, and things start to looks very appealing.

We hope to run more of these campaigns in the future and can only hope to repeat this level of success.

New Website Launch | Africa-in-Focus.com

We have launched the new website for Africa in Focus this week!

Africa in Focus provides overland tours into Africa for a more discerning clientele. While providing quality overland tours, there is a strong focus on African photography with the inclusion of photographic workshops on certain tours.

The new website features photographs taken on their expeditions into Africa, and provides a sense of the experience one might have on a tour. Overland packages range from a 14 day tour around Nairobi though to a 55 day expedition from Nairobi to Cape Town via Victoria Falls.

Other website features includes a number of photographic sections and a tour of the expedition vehicle , which is apparently the best in Class for African over landing.

We wish them great success with their new website and look forward to the opportunity to work with them in the future.

New Client | MultiFix.co.za

We would like to welcome a new client Multi Fix, and mention that we look forward to the challenge of redesign their existing website.

Multifix has a extensive hardware product range, which includes quality fasteners such as Heller masonry drills, Unifix fixings, Wera screwdriver bits, Multifix chemical mortars and many more related fasteners.

Their extensive product catalogue will be available online shortly.

SEO - The long-tail approach.

Thanks to Tanya for the invite to contribute.

I'm the former CEO of workzoo.com, a vertical search engine, and am the current founder and CEO of Seattle based LineBuzz.com. Running a vertical search engine, I gained some insight into how search engine designers think and the kinds of engineering problems they deal with.

Ironically, one of the things we did successfully as a business with workzoo was our own SEO. We received thousands of new visitors from Google every day. So I'm going to talk a little about what I think small businesses can do to get more traffic from search engines.

First, the glossary:
SEO: Search engine optimization. The act of promoting your website to search engines without spending any money.
SEM: Search engine marketing. Advertising on search engines using something like Google's AdWords. This costs money.
SERPS: Search Engine Results Pages. The higher you rank the better.
SE: A Search Engine

Rule #1: Think like a search engine software engineer

You don't have to have a PhD to figure out that Google is in the business of indexing new, unique and useful content in the hope of incorporating that content into a search results page that matches a users query as closely as possible.

If you have a unique and useful page of content on your website that isn't showing up in Google's SERPS, then Google isn't doing their job properly. That is why Google themselves tell you to promote your website by getting other related sites to link to your site. Because that's the easiest way for them to find and index your site without any additional work on their part.

As another example, if you have a website that has stolen content from another site and republished it, and your sites pages show up in the SERPS alongside the real owners pages, then Google is also not doing their job properly. That's the reason why there is something called a duplicate content penalty. If Google detects content on your page that has appeared on another page somewhere else on the web, you may get slapped with this penalty and be removed from the SERPS.

The rest of this post is drawn from my personal experience, posts I've seen on SEO websites and common sense.

Rule #2: Exploit the long-tail.
Don't optimize for individual keywords. You'll never get to page one for "real estate seattle" so don't bother trying.

Instead, exploit the long-tail.
Publish lots of content that is interesting to your target market. Then instead of getting a few hundred people a month who are googling a single term (like "real estate seattle") and happen to look at page 7 of the SERPS, you'll get tens of thousands of people who are Googling a wide range of long-tail terms, like "house with wooden shutters on a lake in seattle" and "brick home on a quiet street near a coffee shop in west seattle".

Rule #3: Unique Content is key.

Unique content is the most valuable SEO commodity on the Internet today - and it's how you exploit the long-tail. If you have a large database of textual data that can be formatted into web pages, you are already 80% of the way there. For example, 1 record in your database becomes 1 page. With 10,000 records in a product catalog you have 10,000 unique pages for a search engine to index. Not only that, but each record is different. So if you're an engineering company, one page might be about a "1 millimeter titanium copper plated washer" and another might be about a "two inch diameter hardened plastic pipe" all of which are very specific long-tail search terms that will bring someone looking for that specific thing to your website.

Rule #4: New Unique Content is 10 times better than old Unique content.

All things being equal, a search engine will rank newer content higher than older content because in all likelihood the newer content supersedes the older content. If you're a news site or a blog, you're in business, provided you have constant new and unique content. Don't forget UNIQUE.

Rule #5: Get backlinks, but Choose your Neighbours.

Links from other websites to your own site are important. But links from "bad neighborhoods" may actually decrease your ranking in the SERPS.

You want a handful of links from high-quality websites to your site. I've seen sites with just one high quality link from a highly ranked website shoot up in ranking in the SERPS. And I've seen others with thousands of low quality links stagnate for months.


Rule #6: Get the basics right

Now that you're thinking like a search engine designer, exploiting the long tail by publishing large amounts of unique and useful content, making sure you've got a constant stream of new content on your site and you have a few high quality backlinks, you need to make sure you don't screw up the basics. There are a ton of sites out there that will teach you basic SEO, but here are some tips:

• Make sure your pages validate reasonably well with the w3c page validator. They don't have to be perfect. Just make sure they're not riddled with errors.
• Make sure the title tag in the page header is something that describes the page itself and not your website.
  
• Good: "1 millimeter Titanium copper coated washer"
• Bad: "Mark's enginnering website"
• Use a descriptive URL the way blog platforms do.
  
• Good: http://example.com/1_millimeter_titanium_copper_coa.html
• Bad: http://example.com/page432.html
• Build a hierarchical link structure that looks like a tree. Your home page links to 10 parent categories, which link to 10 sub categories and so on.
• Have plenty of cross-linking in your tree structure. So pages in the hierarchy link to other pages that aren't necessarily above or below them in the hierarchy.
  
• Make sure each page has less than 100 links to other pages on your or anyone elses website.
• Keep page size under 100k.
• Make sure your pages load fast. That means under 1 second for pure HTML without images or other media.
  

My opinion:

I think everything I've written about so far is probably fact. Here are some items that are opinions of mine that you may find hotly debated in SEO forums:

• I don't use an XML sitemap. I prefer to see which pages aren't being indexed by Google because they don't have enough 'link-juice' and then fix my link structure - rather than manually guiding Google in.
  
• I don't use meta-tags. I believe SE's stopped looking at them a long time ago because they figured out webmasters are all liars.
• My approach of going after the long-tail vs optimizing for specific keywords is probably a little controversial, but the data I and others have seen speaks for itself.
  

A final tip: Use Google's webmaster tools to check for errors when Google crawls your website. Keep a close lookout for missing pages, page errors and slow page load times.

Mark Maunder
CEO - LineBuzz.com

Small to Medium Sized Business Resource

Thanks for the invitation to contribute Tanya. It agree that it is a great idea to develop this blog into a resource area for all things web & website related for small to medium sized business owners.

Obvious topics could include Search Engine Optimisation (which you have already been successfully building as a topic) or Pay Per Click advertising as a marketing tool. Perhaps we could touch on some technical issues such as Hosting or new blog developments such as our friends at linebuzz.com

I do hope to make my first contribution shortly.

Selecting A Website Design Firm | Cape Town

Cape Town is a creative city and has an ever growing number of freelancer web designers & companies. So how do you navigate all options to find a website development company that is best suited to, and really capable of meeting your particular projects needs?

The answer is not short and some might suggest that I might be a little biased towards our company. My responses is that we have on many occasions walked away from a various projects where we felt it was not our speciality, and we therefore understand that there are various companies for various needs.

I have the view that as the Internet has matured, one or more important differentiation points in the industry was the separation of designers and developers. The design aspect as it suggests is the equivalent of desktop publisher for the Internet, core skill sets include being able to deal with all creative aspects of a website (the Look and Feel). Yes, designers can code but they are usually more creative individuals who are not capable of building hugely advanced websites. Developers on the other hand are less creative and capable of dealing with more complex programming languages and website requirements. They are more mathematically inclined than the typical designer.

Now that I have made this important differentiation, the first selection criteria would be to try and determine which of the above two skills your project requires.

1. Do you need a brochure website with fairly basic functionality? Then yes, you need a designer.
2. Do you have an extensive number of products which you market through your website, perhaps with regular price changes? Then you will probably need a programmer.

My next point is references. Can your potential website company offer strong references, and I don't mean a few happy customers or positive remarks from closely affiliated sites. I mean a number of strong well known clients that are really happy with their end result.

Ask the company for a client list or try and find their clients online. Feel free to contact their clients directly for a completely unbiased view. It's the few unhappy clients that you really want to speak to, to determine possible pitfalls when dealing with a particular company. Also remember that finding one or two clients that are not 100% ecstatic does not necessarily mean that the company might not be the right supplier for you. Rather try and figure out why there might have been a problem before making a ruling. And when you have finally made up you mind, get more references.

Your new website should be a pleasant experience and mostly this is the case. Please do not be deterred by my above comments, but rather be attentive in the supplier selection process. Should you require any advice on a particular project feel free to contact me.

Guest House Package Details

I finally had a chance to list the details of my Guest House* package. Please visit the website packages page for more specific details on what is included and the pricing. I am always concerned when preparing packages that I do not make the point clear that we always work to a clients particular needs, and in no way should these packages been seen as limiting.

*I have intentionally been inconsistent in the spelling of the word Guest House through out this blog , mostly because the number of spelling variations. Guest-House Guesthouse Guest House

Winter Updates | Guest Houses

With Cape Town's tourism season in the middle of it's slower winter period, we find that many of our clients choose this time of year to update their website. Often a few updated pictures or some new website content will not only improve your websites appearance, but could assist your site in the search engine ranking.

Regular content updates are seen as one of the many factors which can boost your websites search result ranking. With our recent focus on Search Engine Optimisation and the long turnover time of these campaigns, this time of year is ideal to develop a SEO strategy for your website.

We look forward to hearing from even more of our clients this cold winter.

New Guesthouse Website Package

A website that can effectively present your establishment online is a key success factor when marketing Guesthouses or Bed and Breakfasts. Web Design by Tanya has successfully launched a number of websites servicing this sector, which has led to the launch of a new Guesthouse Website Package.

The package comprises a set of standard pages for hospitality establishments. The pages cover aspects such as the Accommodation details, the Location, Area Information and a Reservations component.

This package complimented by quality photographs can provide an establishment with a professional yet affordable online presence.

Please contact us for any further information.

Welcome Africa-in-Focus

We would like to welcome Africa-in-Focus as one of our new clients.

Africa-in-Focus offer overland tours into Africa for the more discerning traveler. Services include a photographic safari for clients who wish to gain knowledge of and appreciation for the countries that they visit.

For more information please view their website www.africa-in-focus.com in its current form. We will be releasing an updated version in the near future.

Search Engine Optimization Package

It is my intention to launch a new Search Engine Optimization package for existing and new clients shortly. The details of this package will be available on my site within the next few weeks. The key aspects of this service will include:

∙ Website SEO Review & Report
∙ Developing a SEO Strategy
∙ Implementation of the Strategy
∙ Monthly Tasks & Reporting

For anyone interested in this service (albeit forthcoming), please feel free to contact me to discuss how this service could benefit your website & business.

Your Website needs Webmaster Tools!!

One of the first few questions that all new website owners ask is how can they get their Website to the top of Google’s search results. And as anyone in the industry will tell you, unfortunately it is a long process with no real guarantees.

That said there are a number of cool tools out there to assist matters and my favourite one this week is Google’s Webmaster Tools. The toolbox is filled with a number of very valuable little features, with two that are particularly top of mind.

Firstly, the Crawl Rate Indicator. Yes we are all paranoid that the King of search might not be getting to our site often enough and we desperately need to know when they last popped in. Well the crawl rate reveals all: crawl frequency, number of pages crawled and the volume of data crawled. Very nice!

The second feature of interest is the Site Map tool. It’s a fairly simple process to set-up and once configured allows you to communicate to the Googlebot (Yes is seems they might actually be listening) the relative importance of each page on your site and the frequency with which each page is updated. These little bits of data are then used to guide the Googlebot back from time to time.

All very interesting stuff and worth taking a look at.

My Photo Portfolio

Over the years I have managed to gather a fairly extensive collection of photographs of scenes in & around South Africa. It has been my intention to make these available to my clients.

I will add a link in the right-hand column called “My Photos”. Please feel free to browse them and of course comments are welcome.

Enjoy.

SEO for your Small Business Website.

Type the letters “SEO” into the Google search engine and you will soon find that not only is it a a short code for a stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange, but also an acronym for “Search Engine Optimization”.

What you will also find is that there are many companies out there offering SEO services for your website and of course they charge you a fee for this optimisation. While there is a need for this types of service, there are also a number of things that a small business owner could do to his site to try and improve his search engine rankings.

I have found a few interesting articles which I feel are a great starting point for SEO beginners.

We hope you find them of value.

1. Search Engine Rankings for Beginners
2. How to Boost Your Traffic and Profits with Content!
3. 9 Ways to Keep Google Happy

We hope to add to this list as this blog grows and welcome any interesting SEO link suggestions.

New Web Design Site Launched - Cape Town

I finally managed to launch my new website today after a few intensive days of redesigning things. I look forward to some feedback from friends, family and clients. The site can be viewed at www.webdesignbytanya.co.za

It feels like an appropriate time to launch a blog so here goes.