5 Tips to Choose Your Domain Name

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Have you wondered where SGAG, Grab, Zalora, Charles and Keith would be if they didn’t use your brand names? Your Brand or company name is the face of your website as well as the brand. It is usually the first thing a visitor or potential client sees before they see your product or service. So choosing a business name that catches their attention or name that rolls off the tongue. If you are expanding your business in the future, changing your brand name mid-way will be extremely costly for you and your business. Take Grab as an example when they changed from GrabCar to Grab and 65Daigou to Ezbuy. They spent hundreds of thousands in opportunity cost just to change their business name. In addition, many of their existing users were confused by the change and it affected their business processes significantly. Users from Ezbuy will probably recount the times when the business had a major business disruption and it coincided with their business name change. In this post, we’ll show you some tips to choose your domain name.

Singapore brands

In our competitive environment today, your domain name is just as important as your company name. As such, consider these 5 tips before you begin.

Picking your Domain Name before your Business Name

One of the biggest mistakes people make is to select their business name, register it in ACRA and then find out that the domain name is not available. Domain name selection should be done in conjunction with your company name. Don’t forget, you are competing with the whole world web when it comes to domain names while you are only vying with Singapore when it comes to ACRA.

Generic Names

Generic Names or Keyword domain names has its place on the internet but it should be avoided especially if you intend to expand in the future. domain names such as kitesurfing.com or howtowalkadog.com will definitely bring potential visitors in due to the relevancy of the name but it will be difficult to market your business in the future to potential clients. Determine in a long run if a generic name is what you want, if not, it is always better to head towards a brand name to stand out from the other businesses.

Long-Term Development

Before you settle for your current goal, think about what your business can be. GrabTaxi changed from what it was to Grab today because of the bigger eco system that they now play a part in. Create a name that will not limit your business in the category or niche it is in and can scale together as your business expands. This will help you especially if you intend to expand overseas and the current context you are using today is not applicable in that language or region.

Top Level Domains

Top Level domains

Top level domains are just as important as your domain name. As a start, you should always make sure that most of the top level domains are available. This means .com, .net, .org, .sg and .com.sg. As a guide, you should try to purchase 2 or more domain names. This will prevent the unnecessary hassle of other people snatching your domain names and trying to sell the domain name back to you for 100-1000 times more than the original amount. As a minimal, purchase the .com and .net. In addition, you should note that you will need to register your ACRA in order to register the .sg and .com.sg top level domains.

Suggestion Tools

Coming up with a unique name that match your business niche is extremely difficult. add together the fact that you need to eventually create a logo that incorporates everything together is another milestone. There are name suggestion services such as quick and Namestudio to help you brainstorm on a name.

 

Proximacy is an all-in-one solution provider that takes the hassle out of digital marketing for users. Whether you need a website, online marketing solutions or facebook marketing, We can meet your business goals and scale your business up.

Roles of a Search Engine Marketer

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As a Search engine agency, we have seen far too many customers getting burnt by “industry experts” who claim to know how to rank in the search engines. Our clients then pay thousands of dollars, not knowing what to expect and just relying too much on these “expert”.  This should not be the steps taken for any company and in this post, we hope to explain the roles of a search engine marketer.

Search Engine Marketing

Search Engine Marketing comes in a form of either search engine optimisation or through pay per click (PPC) means. If you are looking for an instant result, PPC should always be the primary method but overall, the best still comes from good SEO. However, search engine optimisation should always be an extension of your business and not the primary means. You should already have a decent website that can function well for both mobile and desktop users and work as flawlessly as possible.

Understand Your Needs

A SEO should always understand your business goals and your needs. Always conduct a one to one interview and ensure that they are genuinely interested in helping your business grow. NEVER trust anyone who does not take interest in doing so. Search engine optimization is all about learning how your business works; how you obtain your clients, how you close the sales and how you proceed with your post sales. An SEO should also be cognizant of the competitors that are in the industry.

During your first interview, your SEO should be discussing the following with you:

  • Current processes of your business
  • what are the keyterms most likely to be searched by a visitor to find you
  • website overview
  • how the SEO intends to achieve the result
    • Their references should always be in line with Google’s Webmaster guidelines
  • In-depth analysis of website
  • Past experiences and projects

Search engine optimisation is a delicate and technical approach to rank better on the search engine ranking page after and they should always follow Google’s guideline to avoid penalties which can bring down your overall standing.

After your first meeting with your SEO, you should have a good gauge of whether he is in it for the long term and whether he is reliable.

Internal Site Audit

The first two months should always be spent on the internal workings of your website. Linking your website to Google analytics and Google Webmaster should always be the first step. Next, going through page by page and ensuring that proper meta data is filled out. Next, making sure your site architecture is properly laid out and easily navigable.

Your website content should always be visitor centric. Ensuring that all is done to help your visitor get the best experience from visiting your site. Make sure that all your articles and pages have useful and readable text that visitors will be able to understand. I have seen far too many websites with horrible sentence structure that looks like it was done by a 12 year old. Your articles should also be substantial in detail and contain sufficient information for visitors to trust your website enough to purchase it from the first visit.

Lastly, speed optimisation. I cannot emphasis more on the importance of this. Site speed is becoming a bigger factor when Google ranks websites and should be your priority. Google states thatbeyond 3 seconds, websites stand to lose 10% of potential visitors. If you want to avoid this, ensure that your website looks clean without too much clutter and plugins. Simplicity is often the best solution for any website.

External linking

external linking as described from MOZ

Despite how Google wants natural linking to occur and not link building, it is still the best way to rank any website in the quickest time. That said, backlinking should always be done the whitehat approach. Ensure that your SEO provides you with this approach at all times. The last thing you want is for your website to be penalised for using unauthorized blackhat which usually comes in a form of spam and poor backlinking habits.

Tracking and reports

With all the different work done, the last step is to receive tracking and reports from your SEO. Optimisation can take anywhere from 6-12 months in general for a medium competitive industry and you should have a monthly record of what your SEO is doing in the background. Always insist of getting monthly reports from him so you understand what has been done. This will prevent any misunderstandings and also you can point out anything that you do not feel comfortable with. You should get your SEO to provide with you a goal for certain keywords. This will allow you to maintain a smart goal.

Conclusion

By now you will have a better understanding of why website optimisation is so complicated and why you should hire someone to handle SEO this for you. Pricing for SEO services usually cost between $800- $2000++ depending on your industry and competition. Hopefully through this post, you have a better picture of what to expect from your SEO and also how to manage your website’s progress.

Find out more about our Search Engine Optimisation Services and how it can help grow your business exponentially today. Our rates are affordable and we always strive to achieve success together with you. We believe that we bring you success, you’ll stick with us and help us gain success too!

 

 

 

Why Hiring someone to do your SEO is better than Doing it Yourself

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If you already have a website and aren’t getting any visitors, chances are you haven’t conducted any Search Engine Optimisation on your site. SEO is basically tangible steps you take internally and externally to make your website rank in the search engines for certain related keywords. It is important because without any optimisation, it is unlikely you will get any substantial visitors from the search engines.

While there are many companies and businesses that choose to conduct SEO in house, it is actually more feasible to hire a specialist to do this for you. In this post, we will talk about the 5 reasons why you should hire someone to improve your website.

Learning Curve

Learning about websites, hosting, domains, SEO and tracking through analytics is a steep learning curve. Many of these skills require some kind of background in IT and if you are starting fresh, it can be difficult to understand what is the right technique and what works. How an IT professional will help you is identifying what works for your industry and also provide you with suitable solutions for your business. This can mean Search Engine Marketing through adwords or even social media marketing.

Expensive Tools

While there are many SEO tools on the internet that can help you optimise and create your website, many of these tools are basic in nature and might not have the tools to speed up the process. Most experts have a myriad of softwares to help them to speed up their process and these tools can cost anywhere from $20 to $200 a month. They are able to afford such tools because they have can achieve economies of scale by having multiple clients at a single time.

Time Consuming

Search Engine Optimisation is a ongoing process which will require about 3-4 hours of your time daily. This will come in a form of building links, improving your website by posting new content, optimisation of your website, tracking the flow of your visitors and demographics and analytics on the previous week or month. Unless you have the amount of time on your hands, it can be difficult to achieve the results you want quickly.

Professionals have a commitment to you

Most SEO agencies are very competitive by nature because it is a result driven industry. The results in the search engine ranking pages are indicative of their prowess and most businesses will offer you some sort of guarantee for the work they provide for you. After all, SEO services are not cheap at all and can cost thousands a month with a minimum contract of usually 1 year. With this kind of cost, it is better to leave it to the professionals. However, it is essential to keep a watchful eye over the work they do and also insist on a monthly report so you know what they are doing and how they are improving your site.

Focus

The key to success in any business is having focus. As a business owner, it can be difficult to dive into another industry altogether. For example, a manufacturing company trying to do SEO on their own. Businesses should focus on their key function in order to achieve economies of scale. In addition, you will have lesser things on your mind because you can focus on the processes which drives the business.

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How to Decrease Your Website’s Load Time by 50%

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Through Google’s constant improvement over the decades, they have placed more emphasis on speed load timing and it is not without reason. One of the biggest contribution to bounce rates are slow loading speed. Research has shown that people are only willing to wait for a maximum of 3 seconds before determining that the website is not working. This is all the more prominent for mobile users who will have slower access speed. From this article you will learn the 5 key ways on how to decrease your website’s load time.

Google’s guru, Matt Cutts also announced at SMX advanced that Google is also looking to roll out a version of site speed ranking factor for mobile sites. In other words, the faster your website, the chances of it appearing in page 1 serps is higher.

So with all these talk about site speed, how do you really test your site speed or improve the loading time?

Testing your sites.

Testing with Pingdom Tool

change what is good and improve the bad

One of the easiest free tool available out there is Pingdom tool. by just inputting your website URL into the tool box, it’ll tell you what CSS code or image is taking up the most of the loading speed and also tell you a myriad of information. Follow those tips and you’ll definitely reduce the size and improve the loading speed significantly.

PageSpeed Tools

you can test both mobile and desktop versions

This particular tool is by google and is definitely one of the best if you are into deep analysis and know what you are doing.

It’ll rate your website and tell you the possible optimisations needed to improve your website. If you’re thinking of ranking on Google. Chances are you have to use this tool to great lengths in order to make the search engine gods happy.

Picture Size

Chances are if you have the latest phone or DSLR, you’ll be tempted to put the full size photos on your website to look its best. Refrain from doing this at all cost. These photographs usually are in excess of 4mb and if you have multiple pictures, chances are your website will take really long to load. Pictures on website can look as good as its 4mb pictures as long as you compress your photos correctly.a 300 x 300 for example should be less than 30kb in general and a slider picture in excess of 1000×1000 can be less than 200kb.

 

Total Page Size

Most people have the impression that having more information is better than minimal information. That is totally correct IF your content is not large in terms of file size. Many people make the wrong mistake of adding too many pictures and other content to make their website content rich without having a second thought for the page size. Your page size should be less than 1mb unless you are hosting a myriad of photos on a single page or post.

 

Caching

Caching is probably one of the missed things on most people’s website. Caching is  basically storing data in a temporary area. This means the website stores frequently used data for easy and fast loading. If you are using wordpress, there are many caching plugins available or you can request this from your developer. However, remember that this should only be done with someone with experience as meddling with caching options can mess up your website.

 

Content Delivery Network

example of such a service: cloudflare

If all else fails, a content delivery network is probably the last solutions you should use. A content delivery network or also known as CDN uses servers to deliver the pages and content to a vistor. The key goal of a CDN is to deliver information to you the fastest manner possible. With all these benefits, of course CDN is not free. It can cost anywhere from 5 dollars to 50 dollars a month depending on the size of your website.

 

There are still many little ways you can tweak your website to bring the fastest speed possible but these are the 5 main ways you can DIY to bring about a faster website.

 

Title and Description Tags are Important

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Meta Data is usually invisible to visitors unless you hit the F12 button and inspect individual elements in Google Chrome. And surprising to many, most Singapore websites are missing these key components. Website designers have one goal in mind; to design a website that looks aesthetically pleasing and to give visitors an enjoyable visit throughout the website. But, did you know that there is deeper information that you can utilise to convert visitors to customers by just changing a few meta data.

meta data is information that provides more information. Meta data is usually read by search engines provide different information to its users searching for items. So why does this matter?

Google uses these information to rank your website

Google uses multiple facades of algorithms to rank your website and your data is one of the essential ones. Meta data such as the title tells Google what the page is about and the description also provides Google with some keywords they can gather to categorise you into the correct keyword group.

What can I do?

Make sure that the content on the specific page has a suitable title. The title tag and description should not be too far off from the content of the page.

Adding meta tags and data is visitor centric

ever searched for a keyword on Google and found total rubbish on various search results? While it is difficult to find because Google places a large emphasis on getting people what they search for. You easily find traces of these at the back of the pages of your search result. See the below pictures as example. The first picture shows page 1 of a Google search while the second shows page 10.

Page 1 of search: things to do in Singapore

Page 10 of search: things to do in Singapore

Although the content is fairly similar, you can tell which is the more attractive title tag. For most of the descriptions in the first picture, the descriptions are also specially placed by the web administrator unlike page 10 where you can tell most of the descriptions are pulled out from existing content from the website.

So what are the best practices?

Unique Title tags

There is nothing more confusing than multiple entries of title tags on more than 1 page of your website. This will also confuse search engine robots scanning your site and the page which you want to be ranked might be ignored as a duplicate.

Limit the length of title and description tags

There is a limit to how many characters a title tag can hold, the default is usually 70 characters includes spaces while descriptions are limited to 160. Exceed this amount and you’ll see “…” at the end of your title tag and descriptions. Trust me, it does not look professional.

Reflect the purpose of the article/page

The words you use for the title should reflect the purpose of the article or post, it should not contain stop words such as “and” “is” “then” and other more.

 

In conclusion, title tags and descriptions are one of the most effective ways to show the search engines that your website is done professionally and also to convert visitors into customers. Spending a little time before publishing your page will go a long way.