At the end of the day most people and companies have a website in order to connect with their customers, and the website has one purpose – to generate sales.

So it makes absolute sense to choose a domain name that will help you to connect with the most people, and to generate the most sales.

Here’s how to do it:

First of all you need to think about whether you want a domain name that matches your company name, or a domain name that matches the keywords that people will use when they search in Google for your products or services.

The advantage of having a domain name that matches a product search (e.g. if you sell plastic rivets and that’s what people search for, then you’d want to be looking for PlasticRivets.co.uk or PlasticRivets.org.uk etc) is that it makes it far easier to get that site ranking for that search term.

All search engines rank domain names higher in the results when they match the keywords someone searches for. This makes it far easier to get your website to page 1, which in turn means you get far more visitors.

And since people searching for plastic rivets (or whatever you sell) are likely to be looking to buy them, then the higher your website is in Google for plastic rivets, the more sales you’re going to make.

Choosing a domain name that matches the searches that people use when they’re ready to buy is a very powerful thing.

In addition to this it makes it easier for people to remember your website name, since when they’re thinking about plastic rivets, etc, they can remember that they went to plasticrivets.co.uk or whatever the domain name was.

Similarly if you’re say a nail technician, then you can imagine how much easier people will be able to find you if your site is on NailTechician.org.uk or NailTechnicians.org.uk, etc

Compare this with trying to remember an obscure domain name or a company name – when you’re thinking of a product or service it’s much easier to remember a website name that matches that product or service, than one that matches a company name.

Of course there is no rule that says you must do one or the other, it’s perfectly fine to have more than 1 website, you could have one that matches your company name and another that matches a product search, which can increase the number of visitors and customers you’ll reach.

So how do you know what you’re customers are searching for, and the keywords they use?

Fortunately there’s a very easy way to find out, and it’s free courtesy of Google.

All that you need to do is to go to the Google keyword tool and type in the main keywords that match the product you’re selling, or service you’re offering.

The keyword tool looks like the image below. Note that you need to select “exact” in the left hand menu, and you want to be looking at local searches (indicated with arrows).

The local searches show you how many times last month each of the keywords was searched for, so you can then determine which of them are good phrases for you to base your domain name on.

From here you get an idea of the kinds of keywords that people use, and you can try different keywords and phrases to see which get the most searches.

Once you have a list of possibilities you can see whether they’re available at domain registrars like daily.co.uk or 123reg, etc – but there is something important to note here!

You will see lots of extentions available (e.g. .oc.uk, .com, .co, .so, .info, etc) – the vast majority of them are not worth registering as they will not show up easily in Google.

In our opinion there are only 5 domain extensions that are worth registering, these are:

.co.uk

.org.uk

.com

.net

.org

The .com, .net, and .org have no geographical boundaries, so will show up in Google UK, Google Germany, USa, etc.

If you are trying to reach customers in different countries, then these are the ones you want to be thinking about, preferably the .com

If you are interested in the UK only then you are better off in most cases with the .co.uk or the .org.uk

However, what you are likely to find is that in many cases the .com and .co.uk will already be taken, sometimes they are being used by companies, and sometimes they are “owned” by “domainers” – domainers are people who buy up domain names in order to sell them to people at inflated prices.

Often you’ll find they want several thousand pounds for a domain name when it’s only cost them £7 to reigster it!

For this reason we recommend that you consider using .org.uk domain names, since they currently rank in Google just as well as their .co.uk equivalents (this site for example is a .org.uk and ranks no.1 for SEO Experts, the keywords in the domain).

Many domainers will try and tell you that .org.uk domains are not a good idea to use for your business, since people won’t be able to remember them, and your customers may accidentally go to the .co.uk equivalent.

This is of course nonsense!

First of all if another company is already using the .co.uk and has an established website on it, then your new site can’t possibly leak customers, since your site is brand new – the only leakage likely to occur is from the existing .co.uk to your .org.uk site.

Over time when your site becomes established then maybe you will have some people who search for your domain name and end up at the .co.uk instead, but it works both ways and will probably balance out over time.

Secondly, if existing customers of yours end up at the wrong site they’ll know it instantly – they’ll be expecting to see your logo and website. If they end up somewhere else they’ll just leave and keep going until they find you.

When someone is looking for something specific they won’t just accept something else instead. If they’re looking for your website then that’s what they want to find, if they land on the wrong site they won’t just automatically buy from there instead.

Thirdly many .org.uk domains are still available, and even if they’re not and are owned by a domainer then they are significantly cheaper than their .co.uk equivalent (about 90% cheaper on average).

We have a number of .org.uk domain names for sale at very sensible and afordable prices.

If you are wanting the .co.uk domain name for your business then I recommend that you try Memorable Domains. It is run by Edwin Hayward who is probably the leading & certainly one of the most knowledgable domain name sellers in the UK, and their prices are very good compared to many other domain name sellers too.

If you’d like any help or advice on choosing a domain name for your website then please feel free to contact us, we’re happy to help.

We expect to see a similar wave of disbelief as the update is rolled out across the UK and rest of the world, and so we thought we’d preempt that by discussing it here.

The result of the Panda update has seen a wide range of websites, from the small business owner through to enormous “houshold name” sites losing huge swathes of traffic as their rankings have plummeted.

One particular case to note is suite101.com which has seen it’s traffic drop by an awe inspiring 94%.

According to sources the aim of the Panda or Farmer update is to target low quality “content farms.”

These sites typically will contain maybe 30 pages all telling you how to do the same thing (like make a cheese sandwich for example), but with the content re-written around every conceivable variation of the keywords or phrases that someone looking for advice on a topic might search for.

The sole aim and reason for these sites to exist seems to be to get people onto a page so that advertisements can be displayed to them.

They typically offer low quality content that is “disguised” as advice, just for this purpose.

We’ve talked before about the importance of good quality content in our “Ask not what Google can do for you, ask what you can do for your customers” introduction to SEO, and really nothing has changed at all on this front.

When you consider that Google’s own business model is to deliver the highest possible quality results, then in order to make your site fit into that you must always have your visitors best interests at heart first.

The minute that you start to write content for the seach engines, or to try and “trick” people into landing on your site so that you can show adverts or sell thngs to them, then you’re on a slippery slope.

One interesting thing that we observed about Googles Panda or Farmer update is that they have used Human reviewers to construct part of the algorithm.

They have asked these reviewers questions like: “would you feel comfortable giving your credit card details to this website,” & “would you be happy to give your children medicine that you bought from this site?”

It seems to us that this is designed to incorporate values like trust, authority, and reputation into the algorithm.

If you listen to Google (which is always a sensible thing to do), then you’ll know that these are words that they use a lot when talking about search results.

If you think about their business model, and that they want people to continue to use Google, then you have to come to the conclusion that search results will in the end not just come down to relevance or content, but also to the user experience once that a person has arrived at a particular site.

Really the aim is to give the searcher the best experience possible, which comes down to presenting them with the information that they are looking for, and on a site that is easy to use and trustworthy.

Perhaps this is why in the Panda update there have been cases of old and well established websites with unique content in small niches that have seen their traffic drop off too.

One of these sites in particular had a very old style layout and was probably still using the same site designed 10 years ago, despite the fact that HTML, web applications, and user expectations have moved on significantly since then.

Perhaps this algortithmic update is also adding user experience (trust, reputation, and authority) into the mix in a far more meaningful way than it has been previously, and perhaps a part of this will come down not so much to the aesthetics of the website per se, but more to whether the website presents itself in a way that inspires trustworthiness in visitors to the site.

In any case, there will undoubtedly be a lot of unhappy webmasters in the UK once the algorithm hits our shores.

We’ll keep track of the changes to the rankings of the websites that we’re involved with, and report back here with the findings.

Really I don’t expect to see any adverse changes to our clients sites, since we instill in them the necessity to not only follow Googles own guidelines, but to always have their customers best interests at heart, whether it’s in the content that they present to them, or anything else.

If you do experience problems after the update hits, then feel free to contact us to discuss what we can do to help you.

While it’s very easy to get bogged down in SEO and getting visitors to your website, that’s only half the battle, you need them to buy something when they get to your website!

The whole point of having a website is to sell stuff, right?

Anyway, selling from a website is something that people find to be problematic, so here are a few excellent tips that will help you to sell more.

First of all remember that however big or small your business, and however big or small your customer, at the end of the day all business is person to person.

Even if you’re a huge corporation selling to another huge corporation, what you really have is a person dealing with another person. Although they are operating under the banner of a business, the decision to buy or not to buy will be made a real, live Human being.

So, when you add your content or sales pitch to your website make sure that you make it personal.

There seems to be a very common theme with many websites where they talk about themselves, and their customers in the 3rd person, i.e. the website says things like:

“John Smith Limited specialises in the manufacture of industrial crushing machines. Design and production excellence is the core foundation of the John Smiths philosophy.”

“Our profession team liase with customers blah, blah”

I mean really, can you imagine sitting down with someone and talking to them like that?

The way that we naturally talk to each other is to use “I, we, us, you, your, he, she,” etc.

We use personal pronouns when we’re talking to other people, and you should do the same when you talk to people on your website, or indeed in any form of marketing material.

Presenting yourself and your marketing in this way creates a form of rapport, it feels natural and normal, and doesn’t have the cold, disconnected corporate feel of speaking in the 3rd person.

For some bizarre reason talking about yourself and your customers in the 3rd person seems to have become the norm for websites, when really it shouldn’t be.

Make it personal, writing normally so that the person reading it can relate to it and will keep on reading. One way to do this is to imagine that your customer is sitting in front of you and you’re having a conversation with them when you write.

Secondly, and following on from this, make sure that you talk a lot more about your customer than you do about yourself or your business.

How many times do you land on a website and read about the company, what certifications they have, their history, etc, etc all delivered in the same monotonical 3rd party format.

It’s all me, me, me.

The truth is that no one cares about that stuff – all that the visitor to your website want’s to know is:

“What’s in it for me?”

They want to know that you can deliver the product or service that they need, and that’s it, at least at the beginning.

Once they’ve decided to use you then they might want to know that you’re ISO 9001 accredited, but you have to get them to that point first. Stick all of that stuff on a page somewhere, don’t litter your website content with it.

Thirdly, sell the benefits, not the features.

If you’ve ever worked in sales then you’ll have heard this a million times, and the reason for that is that it’s absolutely right.

People don’t want to know what the product does, what speed the fan motors on the cooling system run at, they want to know what the product will do for them.

What you need to do is to work out what the customer actually wants from the product – for example they don’t need a sports car, they want it because they think it’s going to do something for them, that it will change their life for the better in some way.

Work out what this is, and explain how your product or service will achieve that for them, and you’re 90% of the way to selling to them.

Don’t tell them what the product, service, or your business does, explain what it’s going to do and mean to them, and how it’s going to benefit them.

Remember that “Telling isn’t Selling.”

Fourth, you need to remove any objections that your customer may have to buying from you.

Online this can often come down to trust, it can be that the customer doesn’t believe that you’ll deliver what you promise, they don’t fully understand what you’re offering, or that they have questions that you haven’t answered.

You need to stop thinking from the perspective of the expert in your field who knows all of the answers, and put yourself in the shoes of a complete novice.

Imagine that the person visiting your website knows nothing about the product or service, imagine the questions that they’ll have, and answer them in your copy.

Explaining what you do in great detail is also useful (from an SEO and internet marketing perspective), for example, don’t just mention your “full machine service,” since people then need to interpret or guess what that means.

Explain what you do in your service in great details, each and every step. Your visitor will probably find that you offer far more than they’d imagined, and might even cover things that they’d not even contemplated.

Offering guarantees and testimonials (genuine ones) can help with trust and the belief that you really can do what you say.

All of this will greatly improve your sales from your website, and there’s much more too – this is just the very basics.

Writing in the correct style and presenting yourself in the right way can be very difficult. Writing effective copy is a skill that takes time to perfect (professional copywriters are VERY expensive for a reason), and your copy needs to be perfect.

As you’ll hopefully have gathered we aren’t just another SEO company.

We don’t just offer SEO services, we also advise on internet marketing, writing good sales copy, and basically in maximising your online sales – whatever your online business requires we can help you with it.

So, if you are struggling to sell online, if you need help to turn visitors into customers, or you’d just like to get some ideas about what will work best for your business, then give us a call for a Free, informal, no obligation chat.

We’re always happy to help you!

Of course it’s pretty clear that if an SEO company needs to use Pay Per Click advertising like Google adwords, then you shouldn’t even contemplate giving your hard earned money to them – if they can’t do anything for their own website, then how can they do anything for yours?

But there’s another kind of SEO company that really winds me up, because I think that the way that they promote themselves is deceitful and designed solely to take money off people on the back of false promises.

The thing that these companies do that irritates me, is to give examples of their “successes” that go along the lines of:

“Here are some examples of our previous work. BlackHighHeeledFetishBoots.com now ranks on page 1 for “black high heeled fetish boots”, and another customer, StainedOakFloorsinBirmingham.com now ranks on page 1 for “stained oak floors in Birmingham” – aren’t we great!”

Well the answer is no, they aren’t great at all.

The truth is that any SEO company that advertises it’s services on the back of an obscure domain name ranking on page 1 for that obscure term shouldn’t be touched with a barge pole.

Any website with half sensible relevant content on it will rank for the keywords in it’s domain name, particularly when there is little, if any competition for that long or obscure term.

I don’t know how people could fall for this kind of blatant nonsense, it makes you wonder about the Human condition, but please make sure that you aren’t one of the people who does.

These kinds of companies cannot deliver any real benefit to your website.

Unfortunately the internet is awash with charlatans and crooks who would rather line their pockets with other peoples money than go and do a hard days work, or actually learn how to deliver a useful service, and even more unfortunate is that a lot of them seem to put themselves up as SEO companies.

I guess it’s the nature of the beast really. If you’re a web designer you can show people websites that you’ve designed. If you’re a photographer you can show people your portfolio.

But SEO is to a large part unquantifiable – there is no tangible product or “thing” to look at, and measuring the success of a service like this is not easy.

I guess one of the best measures is to ask yourself “how did I find this company?”

If you searched for SEO Experts, or SEO, etc and they were in the results, then this is all of the proof that you should need that they can do what they say.

If they make offers like “pay only 50% this month and the other 50% next month when you’re satisfied” then run in the opposite direction.

Any good SEO company doesn’t need to do a “half now half later” deal, their services are in constant demand.

Although a deal like this might make you feel more secure, what will actually happen is that you’ll pay half now and nothing next month because they won’t have delivered any results to you.

And while it seemed a good deal at the beginning, they still have your 50%.

They’ve still ended up with your money and you’re unhappy.

The word to the wise, and the point of this rambling post, is to search for an SEO company in a search engine, and when you find one in the natural results make sure that you use them - they appear high in the results for a very good reason…

Because they are good at what they do.

However, most webmasters and online business owners fall short in the link building department, since finding good quality links is very difficult, and it’s also very time consuming as well.

That’s why we’ve launched a new website dedicated solely to offer our link building service to our customers at very competitive rates.

We only use top quality links for our clients, and have helped Hundreds of websites to the very top of Google and other search engines.

We absolutely guarantee that we’ll get your website motoring, and will help you to get more customers, and most importantly, more business to your site.

So when you’re next wondering “who can get my website to no.1″, you need look no further than SEO Experts and our link building service.

SEO Experts are pleased to announce that we are sponsoring Championship Football Club Nottingham Forest for the second season running.

Forest enjoyed a great season last year under the leadership of Billy Davies, finishing 3rd and just missing out on promotion via the palyoffs.

Hopefully (with a few signings!) Forest can go one better this time and gain automatic promotion back to the Premier league for the first time since 1999.

SEO Experts are sponsoring Polish International Raddy Majewski for the second time, and would like to wish both Raddy and Forest the best of luck this season.

We look forward to seeing Raddy score more goals like the one below against West Bromwich Albion:

In this case we decided to do a little case study, since the company is owned by my Brother in Law, so it’s as safe as houses.

The company in question is Autoclaves Group, who make – well, autoclaves of course!

“What’s an autoclave?” I hear you cry.  

An autoclave is like a giant pressure cooker that is used for curing silicon moulds used in the aerospace industry & formula 1, for sterilising medical equipment, breaking down waste, and a whole host of other applications. 

Autoclaves Group are doing very nicely at the moment, they have launched a new website, and have just employed a new sales manager, Boyd Read who was sales manager at Aeroform (click the link to read the news) who have just gone into administration.

We have gone through the new site and made a number of changes to optimise it, and have then started work on the off-site optimisation.

Although the new optimised website hasn’t gone live yet, the off-site optimisation has worked a treat, with Autoclaves Group now doing much better in Google already. Some of the terms we’ve been working on:

Autoclaves – now 3rd (with only Wikipedia above them) from around 7th previously.

Autoclave – now 6th from around 65th.

Aerospace Autoclaves – now 5th from 18th

Industrial Autoclave – now 5th from 75th

These improvements took just 6 weeks to achieve, and we are continuing to work to improve them further and to help Autoclaves Group to the top of the search engine rankings.

This is a question that many business and website owners ask themselves regularly, since clearly, the higher in Google and the other search engines you are, the more visitors, customers, and sales you’ll get.

Well the truth is that it’s difficult for any seo company to promise or guarantee that they’ll get your website to no.1, it depends on your competitors, how much work they’ve put into the seo of their sites, and the niche that you’re working in.

If you’re trying to get to no.1 for “shoes” then it’s clearly going to be much harder than getting to no.1 for a longer, more descriptive term in a smaller market, like perhaps “Japanese slip-on shoes”, so always bear this in mind.

However, here at SEO Experts we are so confident that we can get your website onto page 1 that we offer an unbeatable guarantee:

“We’ll get you to page 1 or we work for free!”

So when you’re next wondering who can get my website to no.1 remember that while we can’t guarantee the no.1 spot, we have lots of customers who are at no.1, and we’ll definitely get you to page 1 – or we work for free!

The main problems with site speed or the time it takes a site to load are related to the size of the files that are relayed from the server that the website lives on to the users browser.

Think of all of those images, css files, javascript files, and the rest of the html, text, etc.

All of this takes up space, and so if you can reduce it then your site will load faster – simple!

So to speed up your site significantly go through these 3 steps:

1) ZLIB Compression

This could speed up the delivery of your site by making it load up to 4 times faster!

To use this you need to have ZLIB compression enabled on your server – there is a simple method to find out (see the link below), or you could just ask.

If you do have ZLIB compression enabled, then it’s a simple matter of adding 2 lines of code at the top of the header.php file (assuming you’re using WordPress or some other dynamic website platform), or at the top of your static html files, and your server will do the rest.

Your site is delivered in compressed form, the users browser will unpack it and display the site!

Rather than me just repeating what’s been said elsewhere, you can just follow this link to find out more – you can even test the speed of your site afterwards to make sure it’s compressing properly.

2) GZip Compression

Although ZLIB compression works wonders, it doesn’t address the problem of the size of css files and javascript files, to reduce the size of these we use GZip compression.

First of all you should check to see whether you can reduce the number of css and javascript files by combining them together, so that only one file needs to be called, rather than lots of them.

You can also strip out comments and white spaces/blank lines from your files to make them even smaller.

Once you’ve done this you can happily GZip the files and you will now have an even faster site!

If you use wordpress then there is a GZip plugin or 2 available – we won’t recommend one here, since new plugins are continuously coming out, and old ones might stop working with newer versions of WordPress.

Just check the plugins section at WordPress and find the best and latest version.

3) Crunch your Images

Obviously one of the biggest file sizes on many sites will be the images, including logos, etc.

If you can reduce the image sizes then this will also help to tremendously speed up your site.

We use the free version of a program called Pixillion to reduce our image sizes, you can easily cut the file size by 50% without seeing much of a change in the visual qualities of the image, sometimes more – this can save some serious bandwidth.

If you follow all 3 of the simple steps outlined above then you will see that you can quickly and dramatically increase your websites speed.

You might even see that your conversion rates increases too, and you won’t need to even dream (or have nightmares about) moving your site to another host!

We’ve had discussions recently with people who have been contacted by a number of hosting companies who supposedly have very fast servers.

What they are basically doing is trying to frighten people into moving all of their sites to them, because if they don’t “they’ll stop showing up in Google!”

Whilst Google are pushing for a faster web, since this enhances the surfing experience, it is, as they readily point out, only one of over 200 factors that determine ranking, so clearly no one is going to drop off the Earth because their site is too slow – at least not yet!

We should always bear in mind that Googles core business objective is to deliver relevant results – not the fastest websites – and if they did just return the fastest sites, then clearly that would be at the expense of the most relevant results, which would clearly be unacceptable.

So at the moment your site speed should not be anything to worry too much about from a ranking and seo point of view.

However… it is always desirable to give your visitors the best experience possible, which includes not having to sit their waiting for each page to load.

There is no doubt that a slow site will result in lower conversion rates, and so there is a compelling reason to make your site as fast as it can be anyway.

For many people the thought of moving their site to a new server will send shivers down their spine, and with good reason, but there are a couple of ways that you can speed up your website tremendously without having to move servers at all!

Well cover these in the next blog post “3 Easy Ways to Significantly Speed up your Website”