Organising Your Website Folder Structure is simple …

Organising your website folder structure correctly can increase visitors and enhance your on site categorisation of pages.

For the purpose of this mini tutorial you may find it useful to download the following template, as this has a similar folder structure. Download HERE

Note: Click on the images to enlarge if you need to

1. If you have successfully downloaded a template you will see the following (or something similar) when you have unzipped: -

2.Ok, so you have an index.html file, this is your homepage. When website visitors access your website through the homepage this is the first page they will see, this is the first file web browsers (typically Internet Explorer) look for when loading your website.

3.Next you will see there is a folder called ‘images’ and if you look inside this folder, there should be a collection of images and a file called style.css. Depending on which template you download the style.css file will either be in the root (main) folder above or in the folder below (images folder): -

4.Websites are basically a collection of folders organise on a web server. A lot like how you manage your word or excel documents you should organise your website files in a similar way, you should organise your files into logical sub folders.

5. So first step is to obviously unzip your template and then move this newly unzipped folder somewhere on your computer where it safe, i normally save mine into ‘My Documents’.
Currently you will have just one page but once you have learnt how to create multiple pages (see above tutorial) your site will begin to expand in size.

6. To make this easier to understand i am now going to explain how you would organise and structure a website about ‘Fashion’. So i start out with my basic folder: -

So i have my homepage (index.html) and my folder of images.

7. Next i am going to create numerous folders because my website is going to contain information on fashion in general so jeans, shirts, jumpers, shoes and jewellery (ignore the male and female genders for this example).

So now i am going to create 5 separate folders for each category: -

8. To create these separate folders i simply right-clicked on a white space within the folder and selected ‘New Folder’ and renamed the folder to the desired category name e.g. shirts.

9. So now you have your folder structure you can now produce pages for each category, for example in shirts you may have separate landing pages for sweatshirts, long sleeve shirts, short sleeve shirts, t-shirts and polo shirts etc as shown below: -

Notice the folder structure Fashion Website\shirts

Asos.com – an online fashion store organises their content in a similar way, this is the structure of their navigation: -

http://www.asos.com/Men/Long-Sleeve-T-Shirts

ASOS Web Page Structure

In conclusion to effectively organise your website folder structure all you had to do is logically categorise your content, this helps you during development, helps visitors determine where they are on your website and also helps the search engines categorise your content.

Technorati Tags: Website Architecture, Website, Web File Management

Many factors are taken into consideration when the search engines; the major ones being Google, Yahoo and MSN rank your website.

One of the most influencing factor are back links.

What Are Back Links?

A back link is when a website links to you. One link from a website to your website is like a vote, and a lot like competition polls, the more votes you get the higher you appear in the result tables, in this case the SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages).

Where Can I Get Back Links From?

This will be covered later on in more detail however the aim is to obtain links from websites that have been around for 5, 6, 7 years; really trusted domain names, possibly links from universities, libraries and government departments, even though obtaining links from places like is difficult to achieve.

OK Where Do I Start?

Start with your competitors. OK lets say i own a Flower Shop and i have just published my sparkling new website, but now i need to generate traffic to my site and increase the presence of it in the search engines.

One of the places to start is your competitors.

A quick search for ‘flower delivery’ in Google reveals that the number 1 position is: http://www.serenataflowers.com/.

To see who is linking to http://www.serenataflowers.com/ (voting for this website) simply type the following command into Google: - 

‘link:http://www.serenataflowers.com’

Don’t just rely on Google, use the same command for MSN and Yahoo. MSN and Yahoo will display alot more back-links than Google. You should use the results for good research, competitor analysis and for generating ideas on how you can obtain links too.

Here you can see that http://www.serenataflowers.com/ has 242 linking to it.

 As you can see one of the back links is from: http://www.marketmarks.com/gifts/help.html.

This is a website about Online Gifts and they offer a link exchange if you link back to them, this is known as reciprocal linking, but nevertheless is one way to get links to your website.

A simple search for ‘flower directory’ displays a list of directories for ‘flower’ related websites where the opportunity to add a link back to your website is given, this is known as directory submission and i will be expanding on this very soon.

Once you have discovered who is linking to your competitors, find out exactly how this occured. Perhaps some evolved from a blog talking about news articles or some of the links may have came from a product or service testimonial (Using Testimonials For Website Visitor Conversion). 

 Your chances of successfully obtaining links are improved when you know exactly why other websites are linking to your competitors.

Furthermore you will also know what approach to use when contacting people to obtain links.

What Should I Say?

Well you may have written an interesting article about product ‘X’ and the website you want a link from may sell this product. You could drop them an email and explain how this article is related to their products and it would be worthwhile linking to it as it offers ‘X’ for your readers - would you consider liking to this?.

Other Methods to Obtain Back Links?

Use Search Engines

Search Google for websites who are actively seeking other website to link to (these are often directories).

Executing a simple search e.g. ‘flowers “add url”‘

Write Great Content

More often that not the links your website will obtain will be natural. By writing a great article about your subject area will encourage other webmasters and bloggers etc to link to you, hence providing link worthy content, using the flower example you may produce an article titled “How To Arrange Flowers”. ‘how to’ and ’list’ articles (e.g. top 5 ways to look after your flowers) are brilliant ways of producing link worthy content.

I will be posting alot more tips on this subject so dont miss out and subscribe to How To Website using RSS or even better email subscription, simply use the subscribe links at the top right hand corner of the page.

Website Visitor Conversion is the art of increasing the conversion of your website by improving your websites usability and giving the visitor what they want and ensuring that its easy for them to carry out the tasks they want to complete, designing or re designing your website to suit your customers needs can increase your website visitor conversion dramatically. Right enough of the background, lets get right into it, here are a selection of tools to increase website visitor conversion.

1. Multivariate / “Taguchi method” Testing

Most people have probably heard of Google Website Optimiser, however there are a whole selection of other tools out there to improve website visitor conversion by applying different different layouts of pages etc, below are a list of some of these alternative tools, i would suggest using all of the tools and seeing how you get on.

1. Omniture Test&Target 2. Maxymiser 3. Split Test Accelerator 4. KaizenTrack 5. SiteSpect

Your really need to try these tools out for yourself, so go ahead and sign up, you usually find a lot of these offer the service as free, so why not, convert your visitor right now!

2. Usability Tests

We recently carried out a fairly large scale usability test for a marketing agency in Birmingham UK, they wanted to increase website visitor conversion. And as a result a lot of errors and bugs (mainly with website usability and navigation) we brought to the surface. We strongly recommend grabbing only a few people (more if possible) who are completely unfamiliar with your website and asking them to carry out a certain number of tasks, these tasks could be anything from booking a holiday in Spain for 2 weeks in a four star hotel to something that is purely informational like finding out the what there is to do at the weekend in Manchester on a limited budget.

3. Visitor Movies

This service i am about to mention taught our team an awful lot about visitor behaviour. Click Tale is a great free service that allows you to watch movies of visitors navigating through your site, you can see them trying to click things that aren’t click able and see how long they spend on each page, how far they scroll down, pretty much everything, its like looking over all of your visitors shoulder while they surf your website, its great so make sure you take a look at Click Tales Visitor Movie Service

4. Personalised Messages

A nice and clever little way that you can find out what your customers say about your products is on your refer a friend function add an area where visitors can add a comment (privacy policy permitting), this is a great way of gathering consumer feedback at its most accurate, furthermore you can use this data to feed it straight back into your Search Engine Optimisation as you will have access to the terms they use to describe your products.

5. Surveying Your Customers

Why not ask your customers all those questions you want answered? - What they would like to see more of on your website? What they dislike? Your customers know the answers to all of these questions and using Survery Monkey its extremely easy to create and distributed online surveys, so use Survey Monkey to create, distribute, analyse and re design.

Small Business Search Engine Optimisation - Research

HowToWebsite.co.uk have been working on a number of Search Engine Optimistaion campaigns over the past 5 years for local businesses whose target market are in the local and surrounding areas. This article has been split into 3 separate parts, the first is about research and its importance in Search Engine Optimisation for Small Businesses and Local Search.

Research

1.  Establish your goal

Why do you want people to find your website? Is your website purely informational or do you have a set list of clear objectives that you want your visitors to accomplish? e.g. increase downloads of sales brochures, increase leads for a particular product or do you want people to contact you by phone? You need to set some clear objectives for your website, start with a list of five, implement the functionality, test and revisit.

2.  Begin Brainstorming

Brainstorm in a group or on your own and create a list of some potential search queries that you believe your target audience may type into a search engine to find your website, for example a Car Trading company operating in the West Midlands area may brainstorm such queries as; ‘cars west midlands‘, ‘used cars west midlands‘ etc. Try and establish a list of 2-4 key words for your homepage and then 1or 2 keywords per product page, for example a Car Trading company may offer different types of products/services e.g. Car Insurance, in this example they may use key words such as ‘cheap car insurance‘ or ‘budget car insurance‘.

3. Research Your Keywords 

Use the Google Keyword Tool to research the keywords you should use on your website. Be careful not to use keywords with a lot of competition. For example optimising a new website (with little online presence) which is quite small in size (total pages) for the key word ‘cars‘ may not generate the desired amount of traffic quickly, you may not appear high enough in the search engine result pages (SERPS) as the competition is too fierce.

Optimising for a more niche long tail key word (longer phrase) will probably generate more traffic in the short term as competition is usually lower. Furthermore optimising for niche long tail keywords will deliver more targeted traffic. Somebody searching for ‘used cars in the west midlands‘ will probably not be in a position to travel to Edinburgh for example if there are used cars for sale in their local area, you should ideally try to use your local town or county within the keyphras as long as it delivers a substantial amount of traffic. Below is a rough estimate of search queries for the terms shown below: -

‘used cars west midlands’ : 1,600 searches

‘cars’ : 414,000,000 searches 

4. Once you have a clear list of keywords write them down or enter them into a spreadsheet under each page heading e.g. Homepage : ’used cars west midlands‘, Product 1 (Car Insurance) : ’cheap car insurance companies’.

5. Your Competitors

Enter your search terms into the search engine(s) of your choice, www.google.co.uk, www.yahoo.co.uk etc and analyse the current search engine results pages (SERPS). Make another spread sheet and record who is ranking for that keyword (top 5 will do), furthermore record what they are doing effectively and ineffectively. You need to be in a position where you are aware of who your competition is and what sort of online presence they have.

6. Referring Traffic

Use Google Link Command or Yahoo Site Explorer and discover who is linking to and sending traffic to your competitors. Make a list of your competitors referring sites.

7. Check Inclusion

If your website is already up, you have low traffic and believe your website is not appearing in the SERPS go to www.google.co.uk and type in the following entering your domain name as shown ’site:www.YOUR-DOMAIN-NAME.com/co.uk’ for example HowToWebsite.co.uk would use ’site:www.howtowebsite.co.uk’. If your site has not been indexed you need to figure out what is preventing this from happening.

If your website has been indexed by the search engines perform searches for the keywords that are present in your page titles, web page titles can be found in the very top left hand corner when you have your website loaded in your browser. If you are ranking for these keywords make a record of what position they appear in the SERPS.

Go to Part 2 >

Technorati Tags: Keyword Research, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, Website Optimisation

Registering a domain name is easy and very cost effective. 

A FREE Video Tutorial on how to do this is coming very soon. But if you cannot wait until then simply use the link to register your domain name: - Register A Domain Name.