A website’s success rests almost entirely on how well it is built structurally. As long as you have the right foundations in place (a strong domain name and a complete understanding of your user) you can then begin to develop the skeletal structure of your website in a way that brings everything together. If you’re a little concerned that the foundations of your new website are made of sand instead of steel then you should take a look at this, and this.

Website structure can be thought of in two very distinct (but increasingly overlapping!) areas:

1) User Structure

2) Search Structure

Search engines want to make sense of a website by crawling and deciphering each page, while users want to engage with content and navigate with ease. The search structure needs to hold Googlebot’s hand and walk it on a tour of the website to ensure effective indexation of all pages – users however, will just get on with the job providing the structure is logical. Today we’re just going to focus on the user structure and next time I’ll go into the more technical details of visualising search structure.

Mockingbird Wireframes

Wireframes are the bare bones of any website. They provide very little detail beyond layout and structure; which is great if you’re like me and couldn’t do better than an elephant when it comes to design.

Gomockingbird.com is a ‘freemium’ service that allows you to draw up one of these wireframes for each page on your new website. If you’re thinking of passing these wireframes onto a designer then you might want to try and be as pixel perfect as possible – but it still helps even if it’s not totally accurate.

Above is the homepage wireframe for a website of ours – planets.org.uk. We decided that maximising pageviews was going to be a priority on the site as it would be monetised through the number of advertising impressions – this meant that when it came to designing the wireframes, we had to think about positioning of links and content to give us the best chance of getting users to explore the site.

While any structure is never set in stone, it is still a pain in the butt if you ever want to change anything further down the line! By going in with a logical and well thought-through plan, a wireframe will help you get as close to your goal as possible and may just require little tweaks as opposed to complete site overhauls!

So you’ve found your perfect domain, or maybe you already had it, what’s next is to build, or rebuild, your perfect website.

You may be thinking, “but I know nothing about web design, how the hell am I supposed to build a website!”. In this instance design is not important. Design is great for integrating and achieving your brand ‘feel’ but it is essentially a superficial layer that lies on top of what is really key – the user experience (UX).

But how do you map out a UX? And more importantly, how do you translate that into the backbone of a website? Well you can start off by drawing out a simple flow chart listing the perfect possible user journey for your particularly goals. If you’re an eCommerce it might be:

Entrance > Category > Product > Checkout

Or if you’re a brochure site that offers a service it may be:

Entrance > Services > Enquire

The ideal user journey looks very straight forward, but in reality there are many other avenues that a user can and will go down. It’s actually very rare that a user will just go through and complete a sales funnel without ever leaving it momentarily. Now you might think the best way to stop people leaving a sales funnel is to physically stop them from leaving it – i.e. once a user enters a category section the navigation is stripped right back making it very difficult for them to become distracted. In many cases this is a bad idea, however some eCommerce stores do consider this method when a user enters the checkout process – they’ve committed to the purchase so why would you want to distract them anyway?

However allowing users to be distracted and to explore the website further is often the best way to improve their experience and increase the number of people that reach your end goal. Take a look at this diagram for instance:

The red arrows are to show instances where the user will exit the funnel. On the first occasion a user has exited the sales funnel by leaving the site, however before the user left you were able to capture their email through a newsletter and they were later brought back into the sales funnel via an email shot. The second exit was a simple distraction, but the user remains on the website – they are then brought back into the funnel by an offer. On the final occasion a user was viewing a product but then instead of exiting the website a related product caught their eye and then went on to purchase that. By accepting the fact that users will become distracted we are able to improve their experience and the number of people completing sales, even if they are leaving momentarily!

This is a simplified version of a more realistic UX, but the key point here is that every page has to be thought about with the user in mind. A really common example of this is on a simple page like ‘delivery information’… A lot of eCommerce webmasters will fill this page with useful information about delivery and format it without considering the UX – this page is just as valid and important for the conversion process as any other.

Think about how a user will navigate from any page on the website to a page further down the sales funnel and structure the site accordingly.

If you are trying to crack your market online then it all starts here – the domain name. So many businesses will overlook or misunderstand their domain name completely. Time after time we see small and medium sized businesses trying to succeed in the competitive online world without any real consideration for their domain name. The domain is the first ingredient of a successful inbound marketing campaign but rarely gets the attention it deserves!

Brand Vs Optimisation

There’s no need for details about the impact a domain has on search engine optimisation but there are two basic principles worth knowing:

1. Keywords in a domain name help to rank for those keyword search terms
2. Different domain extensions have different impacts on SEO (.com ranks globally, .co.uk ranks locally etc)

While it’s great to use a domain name that’s sole purpose is to promote a strong brand; a domain name that is focused exclusively for search optimisation is really going to hold back your inbound marketing campaign. To quickly refresh your memory, inbound marketing is all about drawing traffic to your website by appealing to your audience through various channels on the internet (social, search, content). Having lots-of-keywords-in-your-domain-name.com will not help to achieve that, what it will do is lose the trust of your visitors (hugely damaging for eCommerce) and likely have zero impact on Google.

Dot What?

If you’re reading this you’re probably from the UK. And if you’re a for-profit business then there is rarely any option than .com or .co.uk. You may have heard of .co’s that have been marketed as short for ‘company’… it is actually short for Colombia and will help you to rank in Google.com.co. Of course there are exceptions:

1. Perhaps there’s an absolutely ideal domain name finishing in .net that is available. In this instance there’s a great argument for going ahead with it, just make sure you embrace the ‘.net’ extension in your branding so that it rolls off the tongue when anyone ever thinks about your brand.

2. Using a .org or .org.uk if you’re a nonprofit organisation is fairly standard. Generally speaking, a business making lots of profit should probably avoid either of these.

3. Then you have .tv, this is actually the local domain extension for the Tuvalu Islands, but it works great for video streaming brands like Blip.tv.

If you’re looking for a .com, .net or .org then go to instantdomainsearch.com to quickly see what’s available to register. If you’re looking for a .co.uk then 123-reg.co.uk‘s search function is pretty speedy too!

Budgeting for a Domain Name

It’s impossible to give any hard and fast rules. A domain name’s price is what your business values it at but you can get a pretty good idea from any similar and recent domain sales. But there’s no real way to measure its ROI unless it is a keyword domain and you’re looking at future search engine rankings.

All I can say is that if the domain name you want is not already being used, then you can expect to pick it up for about £7/year. If the domain you want is not available, but it’s short, brandable and a .com, then expect to pay upwards of £500 but this can increase into the tens of thousands pretty quickly. A very vague and general idea of value can be shown by:

Domain Value:
.com = 10X .co.uk = 100X .org.uk

The Purchase

Scenario 1: Domain is available to register

Go buy it.

Scenario 2: Domain is unavailable to register (the long play)

In this instance you’ve found a domain that’s taken. If it’s a .co.uk then head over to Nominet.org.uk (the .UK domain registry) and on the right hand side type in the domain in question! Nominet keeps all information open to the public so you will find out something about the owner, whether it’s the company or individual’s name or address. So how do you get in touch?

You’ve got the owner’s name
Do a Google search for that person and see what you can find. Alternatively, if the name is fairly unique then you can expect to find them pretty quickly on LinkedIn or Facebook (but contacting people over Facebook doesn’t always go down so well).

You’ve got their address
Consider ‘paying them a visit’ and demanding that the domain name is handed over. Not really, in fact there’s not a lot you can do with an address apart from Googling it for more information (in some cases this might reveal a phone number) or even writing a letter and posting it. Just to clarify, visiting people at their home or work with unreasonable demands is not a sensible idea.

Hostname
The nameservers will show you what hosting company the domain is with. If you contact the host, you may be able to get them to pass on a message to say that you are interested in making an offer for the domain (I’ve known this to be the case with Heart Internet).

Now that you’ve found the domain owner it’s time to submit that offer. But WAIT! There’s a golden rule of domain acquisition that you should never forget – do not become attached to any single domain. I accept that in some cases there may only be one domain, but if you are looking to rebrand or start-up and money is constrained then short listing dozens of domains is the way to go. Why? Because if you get attached to one domain you will end up paying far more than what you should!

Making contact

A large company with a ton of room for investment will simply buy what they consider to be the best domain without really thinking. But we’re all smarter than that! So what’s the best way to get in touch?

Let’s say for instance that you owned business-corp-uk.co.uk; you then read this post and realised that actually you would be HUGELY better off with the domain businesscorp.co.uk. Sending an email to the owner of businesscorp.co.uk from your info@business-corp-uk.co.uk email is silly – the price will get pushed up beyond what is reasonable. Think about creating or using an existing personal Gmail or Hotmail account and being particularly casual about the whole occasion. No need for formalities, you’re just looking for a domain because you’re ‘bored’.

If the owner is at all savvy, they may Google around the web looking for any reasons why you may have approached them, make sure you keep everything private and don’t start posting blogs about how you’re looking to ‘low ball businesscorp.co.uk off some sucker’.

Reconsider your domain: hyphens are bad, too many keywords are bad, irrelevant words/letters/numbers are bad and generally speaking anything other than .co.uk or .com is probably not great. You’re starting an inbound marketing campaign so you need something memorable that people can keep coming back to or share easily in their network.

I will leave you with two of the biggest domain blunders in the history of the web.

Overstock.com buys O.co for $500,000 then stops using it.
In 2006 Flowers.mobi was bought for $200,000 and then sold in 2010 for $6,500 a 4 year depreciation of 96.75%…

Definition: Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that puts a business’ product or service in a place where it can be found.

Inbound marketing can refer to methods of offline marketing but its main attraction is online as the number of potential customers is pretty much limitless. Inbound marketing includes everything that helps you get found, whether it’s writing great content, promoting yourself through search engines or creating a following and engaging with them on Google+, Facebook etc.

But inbound marketing doesn’t just happen by frantically trying to find fans to follow you, in fact finding them is the complete opposite to how you should be going about this whole process. Inbound marketing is an amalgamation of all of your online efforts and to treat it lightly would be your first mistake.

In March 2011 Google Ventures, Sequoia and Salesforce.com invested $32 Million in HubSpot.com - a website with software and a community dedicated to inbound marketing. It’s clear that big businesses care about inbound marketing, but why should you?

• If you know what you’re doing, all inbound marketing strategies are completely – they just take time.
• Inbound marketing is increasingly becoming the choice service by many online marketing agencies in the UK and US both big and small:


Survey conducted by SEOmoz.org (US results)

• Many of the techniques within inbound marketing are predicted to become the determining factor in your ability to rank in the search engines.
• Inbound marketing draws in traffic and keeps that traffic coming back. In my opinion, there is no better marketing technique and rarely ever any excuse not to be adopting some if not all of the strategies involved.

Businesses are referring to themselves as inbound marketers, search engines are rewarding inbound marketers, and successful inbound marketers are storming ahead in their industry. This guide will take you from start to finish on how you can nail your online presence, from domain registration to SEO and content marketing:

• Part one: Domains and Bad-Decisions.info
• Part two: Visualising the Perfect Website: Conversions

We’re all talking about images this week – one of the oldest forms of web content but still not without its place on the SEO shelf of useful things. Images can be used for all kinds of stuff from improving user experience to attracting traffic and now (in this post) to maximising your SEO potential!

If you’re not sure what an image alt attribute is then go and familiarise yourself, they are a key indicator for robots that explain what an image actually means.

SEO best practices

If you’ve been involved in SEO for any amount of time then you should know about on-page SEO best practices. SEOmoz have summed it up with a pretty straightforward image that plainly describes what you should be doing when optimising a page for a keyword. However that image is missing something and that something is an image! By using an image and giving that image a relevant ‘alt text’, you are providing Google with a better understanding of what that page is about.

DISCLAIMER: The original SEOmoz diagram wasn’t actually missing an image. I admit to having fiddled with it for the sake of this post…

H1/H2 images

Any SEO should know the importance of using H1 and H2 tags to break up content into headers and sub headers. However in some cases the H1 may not be standard HTML text but instead it might be an image. Take a look at our H1 for instance, it’s the SME Marketing logo and the code looks like this:

<h1><a href="http://www.smemarketing.com/" title="" rel="home">
<img src="http://www.smemarketing.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/smeheader.png"
alt="SME Marketing"></a></h1>

That alt attribute acts as the text. And while not as powerful for SEO as normal HTML text, using an alt attribute will give the H1 some meaning and therefore the page then has some relevance!

Background Image SEO and CSS

In other cases people may use a background in CSS to display an image. Let’s say our CSS looked a bit like this:

#logo {background-image:url(/images/logo.jpg);background-repeat:no-repeat;}

Google doesn’t read CSS (by default) and so the part of the page where this background image is used is effectively blank to search engines. If however, we use

<div id="”logo”">
<h1>Text Alternative</h1>
</div>

then the image can now be read as text by search engines and seen as an image by users! In this instance, you will need to add text-indent:-999px; to the CSS in order to ‘hide’ the text off page and just display the CSS background-image. Hiding text is normally a terrible idea for SEO and I wouldn’t recommend it, but in this case it’s totally legit, providing you are not stuffing keywords in that hidden text.

Link bait

Images are not only a great way to add value for the user and relevancy to a search engine, but can also be great for link bait. SEOmoz (I’m not obsessed they just have great examples) produce infographic after infographic and they attract a huge number of links. If you are creating your own image, think about the possible link bait that it might attract as well as the direct SEO implications for the page it sits on.