Zarr Blog :Experiences of running a UK web design company

I’m a programmer and have been programming in some form for the last 23 years.  Thats makes me sound very old, but I’m not!  I first started programming from a Sinclair Spectrum Basic manual in 1983.

Being a programmer has its advantages in that if I want to quickly knock up a website, I can - and I did that just a few minutes ago - partly for a small business idea, and partly to see how quickly Google can pickup a brand new website and domain name.  I reserved it about 20 minutes ago,  a small 3 page site is up and running and its linked into an affiliate programme - check it at warm legs.

Now you may wonder why I’ve got an interest in that type of site.  Well I heard on the weather this morning that its going to get colder, girls in the office were saying that they found it cold and I also received an invite to an affiliate programme.  The cogs starting moving, I did some checking of domain names and the rest you’ve probably seen if you clicked on the link above.

Bet you are wondering how this relates to the title of this post… Well for a while now I’ve been building up a portfolio of domain names - some quite good names, others have less potential but I plan to get a mini-site up for each domain name, do some basic content for each site, get the sites indexed and see what happens. 

If I’ve got say 100 sites and they each earn £1 a day, thats £700 per week, or £36,400 per year.

It took me about 20 minutes to get the domain reserved, got the site up onto the internet, so we’ll see later in the year how profitable that 20 minutes was!

I’m also monitoring how quickly the search engines pickup the new site as its got backlinks from some of my other sites and on some blogs I’ve read that people have reported new sites appearing on Google within 3 hours…  I’m expecting a week, but I’ll monitor and will report here shortly.

On two occasions this week I’ve had people ask me how often you should submit a site to the search engines, and what do we/Zarr charge for doing so.

If I was ruthless, I could lie and take the money…

However, I’m not.  The answer is that you probably never need to submit a site to Google, Yahoo or MSN as if you are linked to from any site, then you’ll be picked up automatically.  If you haven’t got anyone linking to you, you could always try Google Site Submission.

Just a side note in that if you submit a site using the Google Site Submission tool today, you may not appear in the Google results (even if you do a site:domain.com type syntax) for several weeks.

Just to expand on that, say if your new site A was linked to from site B.  The search engine robots/crawlers getting content from site B would find the new URL to your site A - and add it to the queue of what needs to be crawled.

The when a robot requests a URL to crawl and your site appears, off it goes to pickup your site’s content, indexes the content, finds all the links on the page and adds those to the list to crawl……… and so on.

In hours, days, weeks or months later when it next decides to visit URLs on your site, it will again index the content, find new URLs etc.  You can’t really influence the frequency of visits but the robots will return! 

Adding new content to the site on a regular basis will encourage them to come back sooner rather than later.  To give an idea of how many robots you can expect - one of my person sites thats got about 600 pages gets about 1200 robot visits a day on a normal day.

So answering the question I’ve been asked twice this week: “how often you should submit a site to the search engines, and what do we/Zarr charge for doing so.”

You shouldn’t as it will happen naturally after you first get indexed…  But be sure to add regular content and the robots will come back regulary.

Google… the god of search engines.   Its got the highest market share, its releasing new products every few months (take a look at Google Sky announced today), but there isn’t a quick or easy overnight solution to getting your site to the number 1 spot, or first page of Google.

 There are from what I recall in a The Times newspaper article, over 120 pieces of data that contribute to your overall score or pagerank.  What these are is a closely guarded secret (a bit like the Coca Cola recipe) known only to a select few at Google.

However… In the SEO world there are a handful of respected and experienced SEO people who’ve contributed their comments to what the top ranking factors are for Google.  I won’t duplicate what they’ve said, but its well worth a read

We’ve started using HTTP Modules quite a lot recently for optimising links and making URLs more english-like than the http://…./productDetail.aspx?ProductGUID=8c66abc4-0197-4596-9b21-e5e40b4917c9 type convention you normally see on database driven websites.  So using HTTP Handlers, a URL can now be http://…./A-sample-product.aspx instead.

For getting websites to work on the internet, attract visitors from search engines and be highly ranked, HTTP Modules definately are worth their weight in gold.

We do a lot of ecommerce websites for our clients and when they get online, one of the few ways to get a guaranteed stream of visitors to your website is to do advertising on a search engine(s) - fo example, Google Adwords.

The more people you get to your site - the more change you’ve got of people buying from you.  We did some analysis in the 2nd half of 2005 and we found that between 2% and 7% of visitors to the sites we develop actually buy.  So if you get 100 visitors, you could expect 2 or more sales. Please note, these are just averages not “the rule”.

By spending money on Google Adwords (for example), you can appear on the right hand side of any search results for specific keywords.  THe more you are willing to pay, the higher up the list you are and your account will be debited when someone clicks on your little advert to go to your site.

First time sellers on the internet often fall into the trap of spending their marketing budget very quickly - and then run out of money.  So below are some misconceptions that I feel about online advertising.

MISCONCEPTION #1: Being first means you pay a lot, but statistics show that people area as likely to click on number #2 than number #1 in the list.

MISCONCEPTION #2: Don’t necessarily have your adverts showing 24×7.  During working hours (9-5pm), a lot of office workers surf the internet during breaks, lunchtime or boredom time and click on adverts to get to sites and have a look around.  They don’t really have an intention to buy, they just want to window shop to pass the time.  Try turning off your adverts during the day (or part of), and only enabling them in the evenings and weekends.  You probably won’t get a huge reduction in the number of orders, and your advertisting budget won’t take such a huge dent.

MISCONCEPTION #3: Google may be the biggest search engine, driving the most visitors to your site through advertising - but are some of the other advertisting campaigns driving less traffic, but more purchases?  A product such as Zarr Retailer is very good at analysing this type of information and telling you where the buyers are coming from.  We sometimes find that sites may have 70% of traffic from Google Adwords but get 50% of their sales from MSN.

I’m not trying to say that certain search engines aren’t worth advertisting on - to the contrary.  All of the major search engines can drive traffic to your site quickly - but its ultimately the value of obtaining a customer’s purchase that you need to measure.

We’ve been having quite a lot of success with SEO or search engine optimisation of our websites recently. Our core product, Zarr Retailer is optimised for search engine robots, plus includes features to allow site-owners to optimise their site quite a lot without using external SEO resources.

As with all search engines, it takes time to test out new concepts and techniques for improving your search engine ranking without falling foul of any of the points that the search engines say you shouldn’t do. e.g. keyword stuffing.. We still believe that “content is king” and the more relevant content your have on your site, the better - within reason of course. Robot friendly URLs, e.g. www.site.com/friendly-page-url.aspx, appropriate metatags (both keywords and descriptions) and corresponding title tags are all becoming more and more important to ensuring your site gets picked up and ranked for the right terms.

Our Zarr Retailer and also any of our content management solutions are all setup with these SEO features that the site’s owners can update themselves.  As an example, Markes International are ranked very highly on google for terms such as thermal desorption.

I’ll try and write a bit more soon with more info as to what else we do as standard in our web solutions, but in essence, we try to empower our clients to manage their websites themselves - rather than having to outsource small parts of work - be that SEO or even updating the website themselves.