Websights

On Monday we launched the re-vamped EurofastHost web hosting website. As you can from the screen shot below the site was due a makeover. There was also the addition of a new product VPS Hosting (virtual private server hosting).

EuroFastHost.com’s main focus for the re-design was to

• remove the cluttered homepage and increase focus on the core products
• increase conversion rates
• better SEO (search engine optimisation) through clean URLs, semantic markup, a regularly updated blog and quality content
• increase traffic

With the new design the old look was banished and a fresh contemporary feel was used.

Landing Pages and Focused Content

The main focus of the home page is given to the packages with the main banner changeable to co-inside with whatever promotion is currently being run that month. Using a similar theory to Apple we can promote a certain service, at the moment this is Shared Web Hosting but future months will focus on spam, one click Wordpress installs and much more. Using a combination of search engine advertising (more on that later) and focused content we can direct customers to a relevant landing page and hopefully increase conversion rates.

Although I have talked primarily about the home page future campaigns will run simultaneously with focused landing pages that may or may not be the home page.

The main points to a successful launch were, a cleaner structure to enable customers quick access to the various hosting packages as well as support documentation. We decided to keep the login to support as during user testing this was a primary feature that customers wanted. A quick link to the support documentation is also included. Allot of time was spent creating tutorials for common support requests like setting up email in Outlook. The documentation works on two levels 1. A decrease in customer calls (or shorter calls) frees up staff to work on other projects and 2. Good quality content is indexed well by the search engines, anybody searching for “How-to” articles like Outlook Express POP3 setup, Editing your website using Microsoft Expression Web will hopefully end up on our site re-enforcing the brand and if they are ever looking for a quality windows hosting with good support they will remember EuroFastHost.com. A little bit of effort may yield results in the future.

Search Engine Optimisation

To enable better search engine positioning we avoided using query strings (e.g. http://eurofasthost.com/index.php?c=1&p=2), instead we used clean URLs (http://eurofasthost.com/virtual_servers/) that makes it easier for search engines to index and are more readable. The old table based design was removed and a clean css based design was used, again search engines love css based designs plus as an added bonus, updates are a breeze. If we ever want to change colours, fonts etc a quick update to the style sheet and voila the whole site is updated. This in combination with content as we spoke about above will re-enforce EuroFastHost.com position as a well supported quality provider of windows hosting.

Although only time will tell if the changes do enable better search engine position we utilise google adwords to make sure that we have a presence on the first page of Google. Later bringing on board other search engines like Yahoo and MSN.

For now the volume of traffic to Google means the focus will primarily be on Google Adwords. Because of budget and quality of traffic we have decided to focus on the long tail when it comes to search terms(keywords). Firstly because EurofastHost is a hosting company keywords like Hosting, Domains etc are extremely expensive plus because of their wide focus we would spend lots of money on wasted traffic. To explain the company focuses on Windows Hosting therefore somebody searching for Linux hosting might search on the keyword “Hosting” which if they ended up at our site would leave them frustrated and us out of pocket. A better approach is to used focused keywords that are longer in nature hence the name long tail. Web Hosting with free phone support, dotnetnuke hosting are two such keywords that have less traffic but our services closely match the long tail hence better quality traffic that will hopefully yield better results.

Finally to make sure the site is indexed regularly a blog has been added that needs to be kept updated. If you consistently add content and it stays steady, spurts of do not sit well with the search engines. Steady and consistent updates that are added at regular intervals will yield better results helping search engine ranking.

Pagerank

Before the launch we used the great page rank tool from SEOmoz.org the web site had a page strength of 4 which SEOmoz states:

“Although not a considerable presence, your site/page is making inroads online. Visitor traffic and search engine visibility is within your grasp.”

In the subsequent days the page rank did drop to 3 but hopefully this can be explained because of the page name changes. Something which should be avoided but in this case the cleaning up of the URLs should increase the page strength longer term so hopefully the drop will only be short term.

To summarise the easy work of changing the structure, updating the code, cleaning up the URLs and freshening up the design is done but the hard work starts now making sure the site increases and maintain a decent search position through quality content(blog articles), checking stats to see which pages receive traffic and alter those that don’t.

We have been doing some promotion of a recently re-launched web hosting site and part of this is building traffic through the search engines.

Looking at our detailed access logs, we can see that we are getting a small amount of traffic each day for the single keyword “hosting” from MSN search (live.com). Now, this would be a bit like the holy grail to be ranked on page 1 of MSN and Google for the keyword hosting. But according to our stats, that is exactly what is happening on MSN.

So, we have been running the query on MSN ourselves to see if the site is listed, but it never comes up on the first page (or even on the next few pages for the single keyword “hosting”).

So, our stats say one thing, but we can’t see any evidence of it ourselves… odd. Presumably the stats package wouldn’t make it up, so presumably its happening.

It seem that maybe Live search is somehow rotating the results it show for keywords during the day - we all know that search engine rankings may go up as well as down (so don’t secure your house on them ;-)) but we’ve never heard of the results cycling repeatedly during the day.

We’ll keep an eye on it, but it may be a new development, or of course it may be just a quirk.

Now, when we get on page 1 of Google.com for “hosting”….

Meet Homer, the latest edition to the Milsom household.

It has been a long wait, we wanted a cat or kitten as soon as we bought the house but felt amongst all the renovations needed to the house it was a bit unfair to bring an animal into all the dust.

Homer arrived with us last week, from a friend. He certainly has brightened up the house and has been officially declared a nutter! He has settled in very quickly and as you can see, has taken over the computer chair already and found his way around the keyboard already, computer genius in the making!

So now we have the little kitty, he needs some toys. Looking through our portfolio, Max & Milly springs to mind, they provide extremely high-quality grooming products and beautiful, stylish accessories to dog owners who really care about what they buy. Shame I cant find something similar for cats. I would recommend any dog owners take a look at Max & Milly as you may not be able to resist getting the plastic out! The site is a fully functional ecommerce site, with the facility to simply login once registered to place an order, without the need to re-enter your own details each time.

Again from the portfolio is Pets Health Care, this is the website for the Pets Health Division of Seven Seas, so if we get any problems with his health, I know a good starting point.

With a requirement to have a Search Engine Optimised website produced quickly and efficiently to give their new Whitby guest house an internet presence, Alan & Kath of Number Eleven Guest House decided to use a Worldwide Websights Ltd FastStart Web Design package.

Having arranged a meeting at the guest house and seeing the high standard of accommodation they were providing it was agreed that inclusion of 360 degree virtual room views would further enhance the website, whilst still remaining within their budget.

Over the next two weeks logo, content and imagery were provided and the site was constructed in record time, proving that this great choice for customers who need a “Fast Start”. From our company’s point of view it’s very satisfying to know that, providing we have all the information needed, we can produce a clean, well structured, SEO website, built to Web Standards and to the customers’ requirements within 3 days.

We wish Number Eleven every success with their Whitby Guest House, and look forward to working with them.

Well Done Team!

I came across the following article Why we need standards support in HTML email and can appreciate the argument. The main points raised (see below and I quote directly below) is that standards within HTML email as the following benefits:

1. It removes the guess work from email design
2. Faster loading and reduced bandwidth consumption
3. Make your email accessible to all

We recently launched the following website http://www.servaccomm.co.uk/ which uses a an HTML email. As a company that wants to develop standard compliant sites we were forced in this case and two others currently in development to use non-standard HTML emails to fulfill the brief in a practical and economical time frame.

Our message to email software developers is to catch up with the browser vendors so we can start delivering standard compliant code irrespective of the platform/application it is viewed upon.