Bourne Design? Or What's in a Name...

Posted by Terence on 17 November 2008 in Branding

So you've got an idea for a business, and a plan of how to run it... but there's still one of the most important things to decide; Just what are you going to call it?

If you've ever been in the position of having to come up with a name for a business, you'll know it's no easy feat. Naturally the easiest path is to go for the 'does exactly what it says on the tin' route. Whilst this often does work, it can run into the problems of being less memorable, and can be more difficult to create a strong accompanying brand for.

Assuming you're trying to go for something a little bit different, here is a good list of things to consider:-

• What does your business do, and is it possible to communicate that message without explicitly saying it?
• If choosing a more unusual name, can any messages be more successfully communicated in an accompanying strapline?
• How long is too long? There's no fixed answer for that, but the longer a name is the harder it can be for a customer to remember.
• Is the domain name readily available? Many people look up companies online now, so the importance of a web address should be factored into any new name decision. This is something where you might need to check a few alternative variants. At the very least, always check yournewname.co.uk and yournewname.com if in the UK. If either one or both of these are unavailable, you must carefully consider whether it will cost you business if someone makes a mistake. If someone is specifically looking for you but types .com rather than .co.uk, will this competitor take your business, or are they so unrelated that they're most likely to retype. Holding pages are also something to be wary of. These are often bought up by domain name prospectors to sell at a large profit, and can usually be identified by being a long list of links to search engine results. Whilst it is sometimes possible to buy these from the owner, they will come with considerable extra cost. Unfortunately if a prospector does own it, you don't know what might show on the address in 6 months time.
• Is the company name already registered? Whilst the laws of company names are beyond the scope of this article, checking whether another big company is already using a name is a good idea. Whilst usually the domain name search above will reveal most companies, Companies House can be a much more detailed source of info. Leaving aside further comment on a website in 2008 having limited opening hours, they do provide a useful WebCheck service to allow you to check registered company names in the UK.
• Has you're spell cheque tolled you of any phonetic miss takes? This is a more surprising one to watch out for, especially if you have a website attached to the business. The consideration here is whether your chosen name can potentially be spelled in different ways, so read it out verbally to a few people and get them to write down how they'd spell it. If you get lots of different answers, you may have a problem. Admittedly this is one we at Bourn suffer from ourselves. When talking to people on the phone, it's quite common for people to think Bourne Design, or even Born Design. Whilst not critical (you can often for example register web addresses with a few common spellings), it can save you a lot of time and lost emails later if you don't have to explicitly spell out the words every time!
• Do you really need to be '1st'? For the same reason as above, be cautious with both numeric digits in a name, and numbers written as a word (like 'one'). After the 200th time telling people how they need to write that 'one' in your email address, you'll see why!

Many clients have come to us with a name already, and asked us to develop the brand around that. However we have developed corporate identity from scratch including the name in some cases, so hopefully the above will help give just a few of the things that we've found need considering. You might be stuck with a name for a long time after all!

Competitiveness of Keywords for SEO

Posted by Ben on 17 November 2008 in SEO

Your keyword research has provided a great insight into the search language that people use via a variety of channels, not necessarily just the the search engine query boxes.

What is now needed is an understanding of the competitiveness of these keywords. This means that you learn about which keywords / terms have a great deal of websites competing for them*, and those that you think are realistic can be competed for in time-scales that suit you.

Ranking Factors

When looking at the competitiveness of the search engine results page (SERPs) for your designated keywords. it involves looking at ranking factors of which are naturally held quite secretively by search engines. From experiential learning though and other that have been explicitly suggested by search engine engineers, we know of some factors that are regarded positively by the search engine algorithms.

Depth of Competitiveness Analysis

Competitive analysis can be carried out to a number of different depths, considering between a handful factors and 100-200, depending on the competitiveness of keywords in your industry. Understanding the importance of a handful of factors can go a long way though:

• Presence in prominent directories such as Yahoo, Best of the Web (BOTW) and DMOZ
• The quality of the links to the domain (read more about the perfect links for SEO)
• The quality of the links to the page
• On-site optimisation factors, such as:
• domain age
• domain relevancy to the keyword in question
• appropriate keyword usage in title tags, h1 heading, keywords in appropriate parts of the site
• number and quality of social media bookmarks
• the recency of the last crawl and the authority of the content

To run through each of these characteristics for each keyword and each domain would be incredibly time-consuming but there is plenty of tools out there to help.

Keyword Competitiveness Tools

There are number of tools that can help you measure the competitiveness of the SERPs at a glance, but one of the best (that is also free) is SEO for Firefox. You will need to use Firefox browser (free) to take advantage of this tool, but is certainly worth looking into.

Be Realistic!

The more realistic you are with regards to the keywords you think you can rank for, the further your efforts will go. For sites that have little online presence to start with, it is worth considering less competitive terms such as long-tail keywords, that may not get the level of traffic that short-tail keywords do, but they can be even more converting...and that, I guess, is the name of the game!

Be patient...be Patient...websites may have been operating in that sector for years, accidentally or purposefully making decisions that help them rank well. This means that you cannot always get the ranking that you want right away - only 10 websites can rank in the top 10 of the SERPs...sound obvious but seriously worth bearing in mind when developing your search marketing plans!

Other Marketing Channels

Remember though, search engines aren't the only marketing channel that drive traffic to competitors' websites. Maybe they're receiving traffic from pay-per-click advertising, social media, or offline marketing channels too / instead?  Research is needed here too!

*Please note when you see: "Results 1 - 10 of about 5,130,000 for Keyword-A", this is an arbitrary figure that doesn't have any real impact on the actual competitiveness of the SERPs.

Website launch for Manchester IT distributor

Posted by Ciaron on 06 November 2008 in Web Design

We are really pleased to announce the launch of a spanking new website for Manchester based IT distributor Celltec. The site uses a simple theme and features an animated 3D logo on the home page to portray celltec's mantra of 'coming together'. The site features a custom CMS (content management system) allowing users to add products and manage mailing lists.

Having offices based throughout Europe, the site has been set up to support multiple languages. We're really pleased with the final result which demonstrates the perfect marriage of cutting edge technology and clean, modern design.

I have used a number of content management systems over the years, the bespoke solution provided by Bourn Design is by far the the most intuitive system I have had the pleasure to use.

IT Manager, Celltec Ltd

See the site in action @ http://www.celltec.info

The Language of Search

Posted by Ben on 04 November 2008 in SEO

Keyword research is the most important thing that somebody looking to optimise their website should consider. Keyword research is what defines for you the competitiveness of the online industry and provides structure, relevancy and goals in the form of a target market.  It really does need to become your new best friend, although this does not mean just becoming friendly with a keyword research tool...

The Limited Nature of Keyword Tools

Keyword research is massively important to optimising your site, but simply using the top 100 keywords that pass through the search engines query boxes for your sector may be quite limited as part of your SEO strategy. Consider using other tools and methods to build target-worthy keywords.

Your site (I hope!) is totally unique. The information that is provided, the way it is delivered and the people behind the website can all leave an impression with the visitor, and influence how they use the website and interact with information from that specific sector. A classic example is building you brand online.

Keyword-building

Your brand is 'Overworked Buckaroo'. These are not terms that will appear in keyword tools, but through on- and off-site keyword-building / marketing these could essentially become terms that create search volume, in which you could dominate.

Targeting keywords for YOUR website

People may use keywords to find your site, but then often use other keywords to find products or information whilst on your site via your search box. Consider using a search tool on your website that allows you to log the queries that run through it.

Anticipate and Extrapolate Keywords from your Ideal Neighbourhood

Learning about the your website's neighbourhood generates a whole host of ideas for keywords, topics of interest, product terminology, etc.

• Blog and forum comments help you gain an insight into the terminology, sentence structure and grammar usage in your ideal neighbourhood. This can also provide an insight into long-tail keywords, or upcoming keywords in their infancy.

• Language used in emails, or other forms of correspondence teach you what people are looking for, what people are needing, so consider building a FAQ question's section using the terminology in the correspondence.

• Build content that reflects other areas of strength, e.g. offline marketing materials, press releases – ensure that you rank for the terms that you use in the press release as this is designed to generate interest.

Competing for your Ideal Keywords

Finding keywords is a fascinating part of optimising a site because it teaches you so much about the market, the consumers of this market,  and the flow and integration of the information used to represent this market. More often than not though, ranking for your ideal keywords inorder to capture your perfect audience is a hard task, which requires a great number of considerations.

It's the search engine algorithms that influence who ranks where and for which keywords. However understanding the metrics that influence rankings is possible to a degree, and can thus aid analysis of keyword competitiveness...but that will have to wait for another day!

Ecommerce website payment - it's on the cards!

Posted by Terence on 30 October 2008 in Web Design

Credit; one of those words you hear every hour on the hour at the moment thanks to our ever pervasive media, however I'm actually using the word in a more positive light for once, in order to look at general payment processing on ecommerce websites. Physical shops were simple when it came to payment. Someone picked up a product, handed you over some cash, and then left (unless you were unlucky and they subsequently decided to chat about Jim down the pub for an hour). The most you'd usually have to worry about then was whether that fifty was real and whether or not you'd locked up the safe at night.

With the internet introducing great distances between the customer and the 'shop', getting money between the two now has become an entirely different ball game, to throw in an overused cliché. Credit and Debit cards are the only efficient way to enable this process now, and this is where payment gateways come in. Like a physical gateway on your garden, a payment gateway effectively sits between your website, the customers and the banks. It handles the complicated process of taking credit card details, checking they're all valid (and doing some degree of fraud prevention, though this is a massive separate topic for another day), and handling the all important transferring of funds between banks.

There are no end of companies who'll provide this service, so choosing one inevitably involves weighing up a great number of factors. There are major third party players, such as Worldpay, Paypal and Protx, as well as most of the major banks all competing in this arena, and these all broadly offer two types of payment service. The first is where a customer is transferred to their website temporarily to pay, with the end result of the transaction being sent back to your website. This can be a benefit for many smaller companies, as the costs associated with developing and maintaining this are generally lower, and additionally having a big payment provider name flashing up can aid consumer trust in a new website. The second main type is where all the details are collected on your own site, and only processed by the gateway in the background. This can give a site a more professional and integrated appearance as your own brand appears at all times, as well as allow for more flexible options during the checkout process (like tempting 'special offers' right before they submit), however it comes with extra cost. Implementing the system initially requires many more hours, as does ongoing maintenance if the banks change something.

Indeed overall card processing costs are probably the biggest considerations when thinking about a payment gateway. As well as development cost, every payment placed through the website is charged a small fee to the owner of the website. The amount of this fee on each transaction varies with a number of factors beyond the scope of this article. Many times there are special deals put in place by whoever provides your existing merchant bank account if you put all your payments through their gateway too. Such deals must always be weighed up against additional costs that this may incur in the initial development and website construction phase, so don't be tempted by the headline figures they may throw at you.

Payment processing is a massive topic in it's own right, and I've barely even scratched the surface in this first article on the topic. If you're looking to start out with a new ecommerce site, the team can of course help discuss the best gateway to sit behind the whole process too; it's what a full design agency does best!