Increasing your project workflow and design tips

Introduction

Before you even think about opening Dreamweaver or your favourite html editor and start designing your site there are a few things I believe you need to do first. I am going to describe how to increase your work flow and give you some general tips and tricks that will speed up the design of your website project and help to get it showing up in search engines quicker .In future articles I will be going into greater detail of some of the topics I describe here. Now let’s get started.

Purchasing and optimising your domain name.

The first thing you need to consider is your domain name. I suggest that you don’t just use your company name, i.e. if your company makes tartan paint and your company name is “Hamish Paints” don’t go for the obvious choice of hamishpaints.com. I would try and come up with a keyword rich domain name. Some search engine optimisers (SEO) would say that having keywords in your domain name doesn’t make any difference to your listings but I disagree. Google will highlight your keywords in the search engine results page (SERPS), which leads me to believe that keywords do hold some weight, and besides it will make it clearer to the searcher what your site is all about.

 What are keywords?
 Keywords from a search engine optimisation (SEO) stand point are the key -words that are used to optimise your website for better listings on search engines. These are the words or phrases people are typing into the search bar of Google etc to find websites relating to what information or products they may be looking for.
Go to www.bruceclay.com/ and www.highrankings.com/   - two great websites where you can learn more about keywords and SEO.

How do I find and choose my keywords?
To find keywords that people may be using in search terms the first port of call should be the overture keyword selector tool and you can access this tool at http://inventory.overture.com/ or http://inventory.uk.overture.com/. If you want the UK results, here you will find an excellent tool for discovering keywords. All you need to do is type in words or phrases that are going to be related to your website and overture will show you  related searches that include your term and how many times that term was searched on the last month. Now you can get an idea of what keywords you should be including in your domain name. Please s note that search engines don’t like long main names so try to keep it as short as possible. Other great resources for keywords are:
www.wordtracker.com/

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

www.keyworddiscovery.com/

As we all know all the good domain names have been taken and it’s almost impossible to get one-word domain names these days, so be inventive if you get stuck. I always find it helpful to visit www.dictionary.com and use the thesaurus to come up with names maybe I hadn’t thought of.

Now that you are armed with a killer domain name you can go to http://www.umbrellawebsitedesign.co.uk/order/whois/ and check its availability. Try and get the domain name extension of the country your company resides in as it makes it clear where you’re from. I know most people want to get a .com but if you are in the UK I believe a better extension would be .co.uk as it shows where your from. This will also help in the SERPS when people are searching for websites in the UK you don’t want to be competing with websites outside of your country if you can help it.