Danska Designs » Web content development

What are keywords? And why are they important?

admin — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 09:52:29 +0000

Keywords are the words that can stand alone and describe your company to someone who has never heard about you before; these are the words your target audience type into the search-field on Yahoo! and Google when searching for companies doing what your company does.

When creating web content the main focus is writing engaging text which delivers your message to the visitors. However, in order to even read your text the visitors first have to find your website. They do that either through your costly advertisements (online or offline) or by finding your website on their own in search engines at no cost to you.

One of your most important, most effective and cheapest means of online advertising is to simply be findable to those who are looking for what you offer. How do you do that? The trick is to have the search engines associate your website with the keywords your potential customers are searching for.

There are essentially two ways to keyword-optimize your website

One is called on-site search engine optimization (abbreviated SEO), and means to optimize the text on your website by making sure your keywords appear through-out the text in key location like the website title, headlines and link
The other is called off-site search engine optimization – or search engine marketing (abbreviated SEM). This means to have other websites link to your website using your selected keywords as the link-text. So when a website has a link like this: web design, search engines view it as a vote for the target website in the category “web design”. The more votes, the higher position in the search results when someone searches for “web design”.

This way keyword-optimizing your web content increases your websites findability greatly.

How do I choose the right keywords?
The main thing to remember when determining your company’s keywords is to keep the focus on your target group. Your keywords should be your target group’s keywords. This means that whatever words your target audience type into a search engine to find your products, these are the most important words to have on your website.

You can do keyword research yourself. Ask members of your target group. Search Google yourself to find out what keywords your competitors are using? Maybe all your competitors are focusing on the same keywords. Maybe there are synonyms for those keywords with lower competition. This could be an easy way to get a good position in the search engine result pages. An important tool when keyword-optimizing text is measuring the “keyword density”. Keyword density means the frequency of specific keywords in a text. For example: the word “keywords” appears 14 times on this page. That means a keyword density of around 2%. In other words, 2% of the words on this web page is “keywords”. A high keyword density means that search engines will deem your website relevant for that keyword.

The more competition there is in your market, the more you will benefit from thorough keyword research. Contact us to learn more about how your web findability can benefit from keyword competition research and keyword-optimization.

Web content: Acronyms are bad for your website

admin — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 15:44:52 +0000

Acronyms on websites are bad for human visitors as well as robot visitors.

The use of acronyms (such as “CAD” instead of “Computer Aided Design”) on a website is a problem for the usability of the website, specifically because it lowers the readability of the webpage. Acronyms make web text less understandable, lowers the reading speed, and lowers the user-experience in general. Keeping in mind that web users are usually very impatient it is not a good idea to slow them down. They will loose their patience. And then you will loose the sale.

When reading web text, visitors often scan the text rather than reading it (word for word). This means they might miss the definition of an acronym or they might be too distracted to learn a new term.

Your visitors are looking for information – not puzzles
Good web content writing is about telling stories. There is a story in the phrase “Web design & development”. Even if you have never heard this phrase it still gives you an idea of the meaning of the term. There is no story in “WD&D”. These are just letters, and they could mean any number of things. Web content should be specific and informational.

Bad communication is bad for business
While acronyms themselves do not tell a story, using them unfortunately tells a story of laziness, arrogance and snobbish exclusiveness. It is very rarely the aim to communicate these values to the reader.
By using acronyms you are asking people to pay very close attention and that is a big thing to ask from users on the web. You risk chasing away visitors.

Also a problem for search engine optimization.
In regards to search engine optimization, “business services” is a good key-phrase that your potential customers might be searching for, so it is important to get that indexed by search engines like Google and Yahoo. “BS” on the other hand is not a very good key-phrase. Using this acronym you are actually removing this key-phrase from your content, thus lowering the relevancy of your website in the search engines for people searching for that particular key-phrase. And that is of course a very bad idea.

To optimize your web content for usability, readability, findability, try replacing acronyms with their long form – your text will be easier to read and easier to understand.

You should only use acronyms on web pages in situations where the acronym has universal consensus and is so commonly known that the acronym has replaced its long form in everyday use. Situations like this might be CD, DVD, MP3, etc.
In cases where it is necessary to use an acronym it is a good idea to still define the long form of the acronym. On web pages this is done using the acronym-tags, which adds the long form definition to the acronym as a hover-effect, like this example: SEO (try to move the cursor over the acronym “SEO”).

What is Corporate Storytelling?

admin — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 05:30:23 +0000

Corporate Storytelling is basically a way to sell your products. No matter what the products are there are certain keywords and associations connected to it in the mind of your customer. So what we do is analyse your company, your product, your market and your target group. Who are you? What do you have? Who is it for? What do they want?
We create a positive story connected to you, your company or the products that your target group can relate to, based on careful analysis. By doing so, we create the right brand association so that people relate to exactly your product instead of your competitors.

The Dream market
What you are really selling is a dream. Having a dream connected to your product or company means that people associate it with something else. People feel that when they buy your product they in fact buy the dream that is created around the product. By giving people what they want and dream of, we are optimising the prospect of happy and content customers.

The most important part of a website is the content

admin — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 09:32:13 +0000

Why do people search the internet? They are looking for something, and they keep looking until they find it or give up. Users dont come to websites for their nice design of intuitive navigation (those are reasons for staying and returning). They come because they believe that this website has some information that they are looking for.

Web content also known as “web copy” is the text you have on your website. We believe this is the most important part of your website, and that the structure and design of the entire website should be created in accordance with the content. Web content also includes photos directly related to your company: products, presentations, diagrams, people, buildings, maps etc.

Web content is what both humans and search-robots look for when visiting websites.