The launch is just the start

We have just launched www.british.co.uk which we built using a CMS to enable our clients to easily publish news and features on a regular basis. Our client said “I have used a number of CMS’s throughout my career in journalism but the one you recommended and used is by far the simplest and most powerful I have come across”.

Areoff have put all the SEO and marketing infrasctructure in place while building the site and this includes:

• Semantic URL’s – web addresses that make sense to search engines and users
• Correct header tag structure – each page is structured effectively so search engines can easily detect the relevance of it’s content
• Inclusion of social media sharing tools
• Implementation of automatic site-map submissions to all major search engines

These are just a small number of things we have put in place to ensure that the websites we produce are naturally friendly and visible to search engines from the very outset.

But now the work really starts as our client obviously wants to promote their site on the internet to achieve a regular stream of visitors who will sign up to their news service as well as advertisers buying space on their pages.

So we held a training day with them to go through all the things they can do to improve the visibility of their content on the internet as they publish each news story and feature article. We don’t just instruct our clients to do certain things because “it’s good for SEO” but we explain why these things are beneficial to the visibility of their websites on search engines. All of these practices are simple to implement with the CMS we used to build our clients site. They include:

• Creating relevant and unique title, description and keyword tags for each post/article published
• Adding new categories for particular posts to increase relevance
• Sharing each post/article to social networking sites as they are published
• Add keyword links to other relevant stories on the site

There were many other strategies and practices discussed and the nature of these changes from client to client depending on their goals and needs. W get together with our clients on a regular basis to discuss other methods of increasing the quality of their website over and above simply publishing more and more content.

The cliche is ‘quality rather than quantity’. This is very true of content on the internet. It is increasingly important to publish, index, categorise, link and present content in a way that is relevant to users and therefore to search engines as well if you want your site to be visible and successful in Google and other search engines.

Imagery for insurance websites

We have just purchased a set of images for a general insurance website design we are working on currently for our client.

We recommended royalty free (RF) images since these are affordable and come without the restrictions on usage that are common with rights-managed images.

Royalty free-images have these benefits:

• Unlimited usage – when you purchase aRF image, it can be used virtually anywhere for as long as our client wishes and across different projects. This means that for a relatively low cost our client has access to high-quality images that they are a re-usable asset for an indefinite amount of time.
• Creative flexibility – we are licensed to crop and manipulate RF images as we see fit. For example we might decide  the character that monochrome images have would work well for a particular project – with RF images we are free to manipulate the images we have purchased in this way.
• Affordability – the cost of RF images is based on the file size and resolution, not on the usage. We always advise our clients to spend a bit more and go for larger images than might be needed for small thumbnails on an insurance website. This then enables these same images can be reused elsewhere on paper-based advertising for example, where a bigger higher resolution/larger image is required.

It is true that because RF images are not licensed exclusively to the purchaser there is the risk that an identical image is being used by a competitor and we always stress this scenario to our clients when advising on types of image licensing. If budget and usage is less of a consideration than exclusivity, then of course rights-managed images win-hands down as they are only used by one client in any particular time period.

So to reduce the risk purchasing RF images that have been seen on insurance websites, brohures and other advertising spaces many times before we use image libraries like Getty Images. Their RF images are more expensive than micro-stock providers such as istockphoto.com but for this reason they tend not to over-purchased and used in 100′s if not 1000′s of designs.  In this way we balance cost against non-exclusivity when selecting and purchasing imagery for our client’s websites.