Using Gadgets Within Your Website Design

There are many gadgets available now to either plug into your website during development or to use live when it is up and running. These include for instance:

• RSS feeds
• Twitter feeds
• Video
• Flash slideshow galleries
• Ticker feeds
• Shopping carts
• Payment facilities

Using these gadgets/ widgets can help to make your website very interactive for users. RSS feeds can feed into your website the latest news from all kinds of other websites such as the BBC. Twitter feeds allow your users to see your most recent tweets and this enables them to also follow you on Twitter.

Video is a great visual and the simplest way to get it onto your site is to embed it through Youtube, all you have to do is upload it to Youtube and then place it onto your own website, the video can be anything like an introduction video or one featuring a product.

Images work very well on a website so why not give them a big visual appeal by using a flash slideshow player. This way the images will play very much like a video but look ultra cool with customers able to select the images easily and interact with them.

Shopping carts are obviously very important if you intend to sell products through your website. Services such as PayPal, Roman cart and Google checkout are offered to give you either a complete shopping cart to be integrated into your website or just buttons allowing users to click once and go straight through to checkout. They will take a fee from the final settlement but can be a more cost effective strategy if you are not intending to mass sell products.

If you are selling products you also need a secure payment facility which is where again the likes of Google checkout and PayPal come in as they provide a secure payment process without the hassle.

Gadgets and widgets work very nicely within a website and can add that much needed finishing touch as well as offering users fantastic site navigation. This can mean that users return to your site again and again, something we all crave.

Two New Client Testimonials For Clear Web Services

Clear Web Services is proud of the service that we offer, and hope that our clients will recommend us, as we all know that word of mouth is by far the most effective form of advertising.

We are lucky to have some amazing customers, some of whom have agreed to offer some feedback on work we have completed for them.

Below are two of the latest comments we have been grateful to receive.

Acorn Office Accessories

After spending money on various SEO specialists who promise the earth and deliver nothing, by chance we were introduced to Ian via a mutual business associate. It was only by this association that we continued to seek a specialist in this areas as we had become disillusioned by the plethora of ‘wide boys’ in the industry.

Being locally based it’s great to be in a position to talk to these guys face to face. A plan has now been formulated and we are making significant progress in the right direction. An internet strategy is essential for any business, whether you just want your company name to be found through the search engines, or become the next Amazon, the internet is not going away.

Remember nothing changes unless you make it change.

Andrew Bartle
Acorn Office Accessories

JSF Driving School

I was on the look out for a good seo team as we already had a website that looked wonderful graphically, but was producing very little action!  I googled ’seo forest of dean’, and there sat Clearweb Services at the top of the organics.   That indicated enough for me to make an enquiry, and our business hasn’t looked back since then.

Ian and Will have guided JSF through the jungle that is seo, always with patience and enthusiasm, despite the difficulties of working with an already established CMS site, and the control freak the runs the JSF office (me)!  They have coped beautifully with our demands, whilst allowing me to have an input in some areas, and full control in others.

It has been really good to bounce ideas of the lads, and even better to realise that ones expectations can be met.  Naturally sceptical at first, I have found the whole experience enlightening, positive, and even motivational at times.  JSF is now moving in directions that I could never have imagined possible, thanks to the forward thinking and knowledge of Ian and Will.

I have no hesitation in recommending them to anyone interested in promoting their web presence, as their approach certainly seems to work for JSF Driving School.  Thanks lads!

Sharn Franghiadi
JSF Driving School

If You Are Worried About Your Bounce Rate, Some Ways To Bring It Down

If you are familiar with Google Analytics, you might have noticed something called a Bounce Rate in your reports. If you do not know what this is, you might want to learn, as this is one of the things that you need to understand because it can show exactly how efficient your website pages are when it comes to making the visitor want to or need to stay on your website.

So, what is a bounce rate?

The bounce rate is where a person lands on your webpage and immediately goes again. Think of it like a ball. You drop it, it bounces and you catch it. Basically, Visitor A comes to your webpage, looks, is not interested and leaves, either via closing the browser or moving onto another site. If Visitor A lands on you web page and goes to other pages on your website, this is not a bounce and therefore means, in theory anyway, that your website has something interesting enough to make that user stay or the landing page did its job and has enticed the user further.

If your bounce rate is high, 30% or more, you really need to look at the reason why the rate is so high. If you put this figure into some meaning, for every 100 people that visit your site, 30 of them will go no further than the page they landed on, meaning that unless you are taking them through to a contact form and they contact you, the website is simply not holding the user for long enough, which is of course a problem for you.

So, the big question, how can you bring that bounce rate down?

Look At Your Design – The first thing to do is make sure your web design looks and feels nice, is easy on the eye and is clean. You wouldn’t stay inside a shop that was bright pink with yellow flashing lights if you had any sense, and therefore your site visitors are not going to stay on your website if it looks horrible and feels cheap and nasty, so make sure the design is first class.

Is The Navigation OK? – You also need to make sure your navigation is easy to use, easy to understand and has been well thought out. If a user lands on the page and is then confused or worried about where to go next, they will simply close the browser or go back to Google and find another site that can satisfy their needs.

Has The User Landed On The Right Page? – With a good website and SEO, you can drive users to certain parts of the site in relation to their search. Say you were selling televisions. The user searches for an LCD Sony TV, they will expect to land on the page selling this type of TV, rather than landing on the home page and then having to track down what they want. With time so precious and so many sites on the internet, the user wants to get as close to the product or service they are looking for straight away, so try to get this just right. It takes time, but is worth it.

Is The Content Good Enough? – Website users want to see good content. By this we mean that the content has to be relevant, well written, grammatically correct and offer some appeal in relation to why the visitor is there. If your visitor is looking for information on black shoes and you have written an article about chairs, they are not really going to stay around for long as the content has not met their requirements. This is also the case if your content is hard to read or full of spelling errors, as they will then judge the rest of the site upon the page they landed, and are therefore unlikely to go further and explore your website.

Any Technical Problems? – And finally, make sure that the page they land on doesn’t have any technical issues or problems. If you notice the bounce rate is high on one particular page, have a good, close look at that page and work out if maybe it is not displaying correctly or has some coding issues, as it might be stopping the user from going further into the website.

We encourage all of our clients to either focus themselves or let us focus on bringing the bounce rate down. The lower the bounce rate the more people are travelling through your site, and just like a supermarket, the longer you can keep the visitor looking through your products or services, the more chance you have to sell other items that might also be applicable with regards to the reason they visited in the first place.

Learn How To Build A Mailing List Quickly And Cost Effectively

A mailing list is basically a list of names, addresses and other types of information, used by a company to target people possibly interested in their services, products or offerings. If you run an online business or website, you are probably looking to build an email marketing list, so that you can target users and keep them up to date with information about your site, but just how easy is this to do?

There are certain data protection measures and regulations you must follow, but should you do this, building an effective and quality mailing list will help you to grow your business, your market and hopefully your revenue stream. Offering your products to someone that has already been on your site or purchased before is a much more qualified lead, because if you did a good job, the person is likely to remember you, trust you and therefore buy from you again.

But, if you are looking to build up a mailing list, what are the ways you can achieve this?

Sell A Product – Any company selling a product online will normally at least ask for an email address, if not more details to initially register. Every person who has ordered online will at some stage receive an email advertising to them other products from the same company, as if you have existing customers, you must keep them coming back, and sending out information about new products or offering them discounts is a good way to do this, but you need to capture their data first.

Give Something Away For Free – Everyone loves something for nothing, and you can build up your client or mailing list by giving them a chance to win something or maybe giving away a free product or download. As long as the free offering is useful and of good quality, people will sign up to receive your free gift, but only do this if you are genuinely giving something away, as an invitation to win a holiday in the Caribbean that then never materialises is only going to cause your company reputation much damage and is of course considered basic fraud!

Offer Services – If you are going to be offering a service, like a free website review or informative chat over the phone offering advice or guidance about something, you can capture people’s data this way, as most users will welcome the chance to have a free service, especially with the current economical climate being so tough.

Give The User Exclusive Content – One way to attract user registrations is to offer them content, something they can only read or have access to should they sign up and be registered with your site. More people are willing to do this now days, but do make sure they are not disappointed and that when they get access to the content, they feel it has been worthwhile joining your site. Maybe offer them access to your articles or produce a decent PDF guide that they can download once registered, just make sure its quality content.

Tutorials Or Advice For Registered Users – A great way of capturing emails is to offer a 5 part guide to something or regular information that is useful and rewarding to the client. This way, not only are you building your mailing list but you are also making people look forward to your emails and releases, and if you do them at the same time each week for example, people will come to expect them and if you get to this stage you will have a solid mailing list and data capture.

No matter how you plan to capture visitor’s data you must make sure that you reward them for giving you their information or spending money with you. Like Tesco’s, make sure you give them something for coming back to your shop and spending money, or like a newspaper, give something away for free or offer the user a chance to win something.

As long as they do not feel disappointed after registering with you, you can begin to build an effective and useable mailing list within no time and start cross selling your products or services to a market that you know is already interested.

Clear Web Services Launches SEO Campaign For Living Abroad Magazine

Clear Web Services, based in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, are proud to announce a new partnership with one of the largest magazines offering advice for people moving abroad, looking to live abroad and hoping to emigrate to lands far away, the hugely successful Living Abroad Magazine.

Living Abroad Magazine, based in Scotland, are one of the largest offline publications for people seeking advice for moving abroad, with each monthly issue packed full of guides, articles, tips and advice covering many countries and offering quality information to help make the move as smooth as possible.

Their new website offers a wealth of information, with informative articles, country facts, country guides, emigration information, case studies, diaries and so much more. The website is aimed at complementing the magazine, and will soon have a range of properties for all users to view online, meaning that you will be able to find every from how to move to Australia right through to a special buy in Thailand, making this your one stop shop for moving abroad.

The publication is available on a monthly basis, and they also offer a subscription method, meaning the latest edition will land on your door stop well ahead of hitting the shops and you will also save money, which makes subscribing to this magazine a must. Not only that, you will find yourself reading away about a new life in the sun, learning about the many opportunities that lay ahead of you in your chosen destination.

Clear Web Services Managing Director Ian Spencer commented:

“For a company based in the Forest of Dean, this is a huge honour and privilege to be working with a publication that is held in the highest esteem as being one of the leading magazines when it comes to people moving abroad. Working with the team at the Living Abroad Magazine has been an absolute pleasure, and the early signs are that the campaign is now really bedding in.”

“We were approached to take on the SEO campaign for their new website, and after a couple of consultations, we believe we have put into place a sound SEO campaign for the months ahead, and have recently launched the cost per click campaign, which we also manage for the company. We hope with the new campaign and the constant monitoring of the CPC campaign, we can help to deliver the early expectations for them”.

Clear Web Services offers SEO Services and Web Design in the Forest of Dean, serving Coleford, Lydney, Cinderford, Clearwell and many other areas in the Forest. We also cover Gloucester, South Wales, including Chepstow and Monmouth and Hereford, in particular Ross on Wye.

Useful Tips For Getting Your New Site Indexed And Ranking In The Search Engines

Launching a new site is often a proud moment for the individual or business concerned, as months of planning, preparation, work and testing have all been completed and you are now ready to show the world. But, the newest problem now emerges, how do you get the people to see your site if it is not in the search engines?

We offer some useful advice, tips and methods of getting your site indexed, which if you follow most or all; you should be able to see your site in the major search engines before long.

Holding Page – Once you have the idea for a new site and have the domain name, get it hosted and put a simple holding page up. The biggest problem for getting indexed is getting that first page indexed, so if you can manage to let the engines know about your site months before launch via a holding page, they will already know about you and come round to play much quicker than if launching a new domain name with no background.

Tell The Engines – Although not used as much these days, all of the engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing still have a screen where you can “submit” your site to the engine, letting them know a new kid is on the block. Simply go to the engine of your choice and look for a “Submit Site” page, where you then enter your URL, hit the submit button and wait for the robots to come crawling.

Webmaster Control Panel – All of three major search engines have a Webmaster control panel, which you can add your site to. Once you have signed up and verified your site, you can then submit a sitemap to each of the control panels, which helps to the search engine about your new site and therefore send the robots to crawl the site. The Google Webmaster control panel even lets you set the speed of crawling rate, which can help in getting a site with lots of pages crawled more quickly. You will continue to use the webmaster control panel for the rest of your site’s life, so this is well worth doing straight away.

Google Analytics – If you add Google Analytics to your site, because the code is on every page of your site, then Google will know about your site in much more detail than without. We have seen sites get indexed just by adding the Google Analytics code, so not only will you get the best statistics package on the internet, you will also hopefully help to get your site indexed quicker.

Links From High Page Rank Sites – The engines follow links from other sites to find new sites. If you have a link from a really important site or a site with a high page rank, you can be sure the engines will find your site much quicker, as they assume a link from an important site is well worth following, as it will be deemed to be important and have authority, simply because a site with a good ranking and authority is linking to it.

Press Releases – There are many paid and free press release sites on the internet and by getting your press release, including information about your site, contact details and of course that all important link back, you can let the engines know about the site and what it does and by having a link to your site, means they will follow this to help get your site indexed quicker.

Article Submissions – Pretty much the same as Press Releases, most paid and free article submission sites allow you to give some good advice, but in turn reward you with a link back to your site. If you then release a load of articles about your niche and relevant information, all of which have your name and link, the engines will then come along and not only know what your about, but see the link, follow it and also use it to help with your rankings, as you will begin to pick up authority.

Pay Per Click – All three of the engines, Yahoo, Google and Bing offer paid advertising. As anyone who has used or is using Pay Per Click will know, you have to give each engine your link to spend money on PPC. So, this is great way of getting your website known about to all of the big players, and in the meantime you will also be getting early traffic from paid advertising.

Hopefully, if you implement some of the above, even if they are only the ones you can realistically achieve, you should stand a much better chance of getting your site indexed and ranking in the engines quicker than if just waiting for it to happen by chance, which could take a long time.

When Should You Employ The Services Of An SEO Specialist

Many businesses who have their own websites reach a point where their website stops pulling in as much new traffic as it used to. The other common occurrence is over spending on PPC (pay per click advertising) when once upon a time they didn’t spend as much and got more results.

Usually the factors that determine the above is competition, maybe when your website first went live there wasn’t many competitors on the internet, now however there is more all trying to get the traffic from potential customers. This means that PPC keywords you previously bid on are now more expensive and the traffic of new customers is spread between you and your competitors.

If you have got to this stage or your website hasn’t really attracted enough traffic in the first place then employing the services of an SEO specialist is a good idea. They will be able to identify what your competitors are up to with regards to their website and what you could be doing to improve yours when compared.

The type of things that will be identified during an analysis will be:

• Page keywords
• Page descriptions
• Page titles
• Website footers
• Page ranking
• Indexed pages (through various search engines)
• Links (inbound and outbound)

With these identified an SEO specialist can make suggestions on how to improve your own site optimisation by finding elements that your competitors are doing well with and what they may have missed. This is very important information for your website. They can also recommend amendments to be made to your website such as new content, blogs, change of navigation and also identify what isn’t working and how to correct it, this could mean in some cases a site change or update which sounds like a tall order but normally isn’t and can dramatically help your traffic increase.

An SEO specialist can identify you PPC campaign, if they are worth their salt they can either cut the costs of your current campaign to make it more cost effective but still pull in traffic or maintain your current spend but target it into better areas so you will receive higher levels of traffic.

An SEO specialist will not only be able to increase your traffic but to make that traffic one you can turn into business due to the targeted nature of the SEO.

How Important Is Good Website Navigation

If you are in the process of having a website design or are maybe thinking about updating one you currently have then one thing that has to be considered carefully is site navigation.

Navigation is how easy is your site to navigate? Can users easily find the information they want and fairly quickly. This sounds very simple but it is sometimes something that is forgotten when a website design is in progress. When you are getting the website designed you can so easily get over involved with the look and feel of the site and overlook things such as:

• Menus
• Footers
• Sitemaps
• Image links

Menus are one of the main components and things to consider with menus are:

• Where are they going to be positioned?
• Will they be text based or images?
• Will they link to the right page?

When we look at positioning of menus I believe that you have three options, you can place it at the top of the site, the left hand side or the right hand side. The strongest options are definitely along the top and the right hand side. You can actually choose both options if you have a lot of pages to navigate. They have to go where the user will look for them naturally making navigation simple.

Will the images be text based or an image, remembering that search engines cannot read images. So text based is the best option but if it will compromise the look of the site using images is fine but just make sure that they look right and are Alt tagged, this way you get the best of both worlds.

This sounds like a simple one but the menus must link to the correct pages, there is nothing more frustrating than a site that has broken links, you click onto the page you want and a 404 page comes up. This can at times happen so make sure you have a well designed 404 page so users do not automatically leave your site and go elsewhere. Testing of links must be rigorously done in the early stages of the site going live so that any faults can be adjusted.

Footers not only give you the opportunity to write some text about yourself (good for search engines) but you can also place a small text based menu there. This gives users another option but also helps the menu to be read by search engines. Only make the footer a maximum of two lines though.

Sitemaps are very important to both navigation and search engines. A sitemap has listed within it every page on your website; this can be included in the footer menu. Users can use this as a means of navigation if they want to and believe me with some sites it is by far the quickest way to find out information. Sitemaps are also crawled through by search engines to pick up information, if you don’t have one you are definitely missing a trick. They must also be updated every time the site is changed with content to enable the search engines to know about it.

Lastly make sure that any images used are not only clear and relevant but if they are supposed to be linked to a page or are anchored then make sure that it works, again broken links are frustrating to users as it stops them from accessing what they require.

Make sure you mention the above to whoever is designing your site, don’t automatically think that it will be done as not all designers put sitemaps in. Hopefully this small guide will help you to understand navigation and allow you to create a user friendly site which will have them coming back for more.

How Using A Content Management System (CMS) Can Save You Time And Money

Content Management Systems, like Wordpress and Joomla have taken the ability to make and maintain a website to a new level for people and clients without any web design skills and also the most experienced web designer and coding expert. The ability to allow people to make simple changes to their website, without having to pay extra money for the privilege has transformed the whole aspect of running a website for business owners who previously thought that it was simply to expensive and time intensive to really make it worthwhile.

Wordpress and Joomla have both allowed websites to be delivered to clients allowing them to make simple changes and add or delete content with ease, meaning the client does not end up having the pay costly invoices just because they want a simple change to be implemented on their own website. It also means you can make the changes instantly, instead of having to fit into someone’s schedule and end up waiting much longer for the change than you expected.

A Content Management System allows you to:

• Make Changes – A decent CMS will allow you to make quick changes easily and efficiently, meaning that if you wake up at 3am and spot a spelling error, you can fix it, publish and then hopefully sleep a little easier knowing you don’t have to wait for your web designer to make this change for you, and charge for it.
• Add Content – There is nothing more frustrating for a budding web entrepreneur than having to wait for someone else to do something. A CMS allows you to add the content within seconds of entering your admin area, and it will be live on the internet for your public to see within a few seconds of clicking the publish button!
• Instant Access – Because the CMS sits behind your website, as long as you have an internet connection you can login and access the system, meaning wherever you are in the world, on holiday or travelling on a train, you can access your own website, make changes and do whatever you need to do. Adding your latest article or uploading your photos can be done from anywhere in the world, meaning more control and quicker updates for your personal website or commercial offering.
• Optimisation – A good CMS allows you to not only control the content, but also control your keywords, title and description tags, per page, which means you will have the chance to really optimise your site. Although content is always the most important thing for getting traffic, you still need to make the pages optimised, and a good CMS will give you full control of this as well.

When most web designers first started designing websites, they would of used programs like Frontpage and Dreamweaver, and then have to upload the new pages via FTP. This caused major issues if you had more than one person in more than one location working on the site, due to content control issues. A CMS will take this issue away, as everything is done online and most decent ones will also lock the page, meaning only one person can open it at one time.

A CMS will save you time and money because you can do things quickly and do them yourself. When you take people you rely on out of the equation, you then take back control, which any business owner will tell you is a must when it comes to trying to stream operations to make them more cost efficient. It is also much more rewarding once you have got to grips with a CMS, as it just means you are now in control of another aspect of your business, which is vital in this day and age.

Will a CMS ever replace the need for Web Designers and Developers? The answer is no, not at all. It just means that we can give our clients more control over what they can do on their own website, something we feel is very important for clients and customers. A good CMS actually helps web designers and developers to do their job more efficiently, as the coding aspect is normally really good; leaving them to concentrate on making sure the website is perfect for the client.

Optimised Web Site Design

Many people believe that just having a website is enough to get their business off and running online, this however just isn’t true. If you have committed to having a web site designed then of course you have made a good start but don’t just go for a flashy design with lots of features.

In order for a website to work correctly there are many things to be considered:

• Site download time
• On page optimisation
• User Friendly design
• Page dimensions
• Content
• Install an analytics package

The above are all very important in the process of building a site and should be considered carefully.

Site download time is becoming an important issue and rumours have it that search engines are going to be looking at this more and more. Visitors to your website will not want to wait a long time for it to download; research has shown that users will only wait on average 8 seconds for a page download. If your site is too slow you will lose visitors to competitors. To speed up your site don’t add too many images and limit the amount of flash involved.

On page optimisation is crucial if you want search engines to find your website. With more and more people using search engines to find websites and information you really need to carefully select what keywords, descriptions and page titles you use. Think about what words people will use to search for you and make sure that they are included in the title, description and keywords. By doing this you will be found by search engines. An SEO specialist can help you with this.

Make sure your website has a user friendly design; you need to think about where certain things should be such as menus and content. Most people get used to looking in certain places for menus and links so if you put yours in an unusual place they won’t be able to find it and will leave. Other things to consider are colour schemes don’t over do it as it will confuse your users, do make it appealing though.

Page dimensions can be a difficult one, if you are using a large widescreen monitor then your design may look good but to someone who is using a smaller screen it can be a bad experience. Do not make the page too wide because users with smaller screens will have to navigate horizontally which is a big turn off for most users. Height isn’t such a big issue as users do not mind scrolling down a page, but this said don’t go over board.

Content is probably one of the most important components of any site. Search engines love content and it looks like they always will. New updated content gives them something to read and makes your website more important to them helping you become more visible. This said don’t just write any old thing on there as the most important aspect is that users who come onto your site want to find what they are looking for and easily so don’t babble. Content can also come in the form of blogs so make sure your website has an integrated blog as this way any updates are new and fresh and on your site. Content can also contain good keywords which again will appeal to search engines.

Obviously you will want to know how many visitors your site has and where they have come from; you would be surprised at the amount of websites designed without this in mind. Without analytics you do not know what is going on, it is like having a store and not knowing how many visitors are coming in. If you have an e-commerce site then by not knowing your visitors you will not know your conversion rate of sales. If you know that 1000 people visit your site each week but you are only selling 10 items something is wrong, you can then look at your site design, products and pricing to understand what is putting people off. Analytics is vital to understanding your web site.

Having a website is a great way to showcase your business or personal interests but if it isn’t optimised then nobody can find it and it will be just out there not creating any interest.

Next Page »