The domain industry can be confusing for someone who doesn’t understand the relationship between registrars, resellers & registrants. If you’re not 100% sure who hosts your website or which company handles registration for your domain, you could be in trouble when the domain’s registration expires.

Here’s a quick overview on the key points of domain ownership.

• Check where your domain is to be ready for a pop quiz: When switching web hosts, you need to have administrative access to the account responsible for domain registration. Checking the WHOIS for the domain will tell you which company handles the top-level registration (the registrar like GoDaddy or eNom) and the registrant (who owns the domain). Check out popular WHOIS sites like Ajax Whois or WHOIS.net.

• In which cellar does the reseller dweller?: Resellers sell domain registration using registrars. For example, if you bought your domain with a company named Domainer 101, and they use GoDaddy to register domains, your domain will appear to be registered with GoDaddy. Sometimes Domainer 101 will put their WHOIS information on the domain to dictate ownership. If you’re not sure which reseller you purchased your domain registration with, the registrar can help you figure it out and point you in the right direction.
• The DNS nameserver is your domain’s life preserver: Think of DNS nameservers as being traffic cops for web users. When a person types your website into a browser, the DNS nameserver guides them to the right web hosting account.

The most important thing is to be aware. Take some time and document which company is responsible for your domain’s registration and which company you get web hosting services from. While it’s easier to work with a company that offers both web site hosting and domain registration, it’s essential to know every company that is responsible for keeping your website online.

The About Us page is the second most often visited page in the typical website. People want to know who is running your website. Take some time and craft this page so visitors can learn about your company. Use your website content writing skills to help your visitor understand who you are.

The About Us page is a chance to cement a relationship and connect with someone who is curious about your business. They are there to learn about what you do.  They are looking for signs of trust and credibility. Let customers see the human side of your company. Show your personality.

Visitors will look to see if you are a real company with a physical address. Tell them a little about your company.  Instead of including a long history of your company, simply state when your company was founded and how long you have been serving your industry.

Tip- People enjoy reading the story on how a company got started and what led the founder to launch the business.

Describe how you are different and better than your competition. Share your company philosophies, awards and certifications. If you have important affiliations, this is the page to include them.

The About us page should be concise and easy to read. Its main purpose is to build trust with your visitor. People want to feel safe and secure before they buy from you or even give you their email address.

You can add a “Meet the Staff” page where you show short profiles on the key staff members. Include the key “movers and shakers” and key people that interact with customers.

As you sit down to write compelling content for your new website, you need to understand that website content writing is different than writing for print. People read differently from a screen than from a page. With a business website design, you are writing for two audiences: your visitor and the search engines.

You need to understand how people read web content. People will read something more completely when it is written on paper and only skim information that is presented on the screen. They tend to ignore details, reading short paragraphs or bulleted lists.

Why?  They are able to read a paper document 25% faster. It is physically harder to read from the screen. It is harder on the eyes. There are a lot of reasons for this such as sharpness of font, font size, contrast, position of the screen.

In print you can control the reader from introduction to conclusion. With web content the visitor is in control and they choose their own path of what to read next. They follow navigation and links according to what interests them.

On the screen, few people read everything on a page. Most will scan a page looking for the information they are after. They skip whole blocks of text, particularly longer paragraphs. The same way a graphic designer will call attention to elements with color, a web copywriter highlights with format and structure. This means headlines, using bold, bulleted lists, etc.  Information in larger paragraphs is more hidden.

To get great SEO results, you need to understand how search engines index that same content. Search engines are able to spider and index text and not images. It is important to write with keyword rich text using keywords in headlines, bold print, lists and links. These are what search engines “see” as important.

Google Maps has become an interesting resource for different needs searchers may have; it’s a fantastic way to look up directions, the street view can provide details about landmarks, and the way they handle local results in search queries is seamless and beneficial for companies.

The latest update to Google Maps expands the number of listings outside of the normal top 10 results. The new “map” results not only includes the lettered main results, but also dots that represent other options not included for the top 10 results.

What does this mean?

Specifically, if I’m looking for pizza in my area, I can finally see results that aren’t the big companies. And some of these places that were not in the top 10 results are actually closer to my location! Let me give you an example of what I’m seeing:

Searching for something very broad like “pizza vancouver wa” brings up quite a few options. Previous to this update for Google Maps, I would have only seen the items that have letters, the top results. The circled result is a pizza place I wouldn’t have seen prior to this update, and is actually my closest option!

Seeing a closer option, even if it isn’t a big chain, is something I would investigate in a second.

So, how does this affect your company?

If you’re competing in a market flooded with competitors, this new update gives you a means of competition – accessibility. If someone looking for yarn saw your specialty organic wool store closer than a Michaels or Jo-Ann location, they may be more inclined to visit you. Before this update, your listing wasn’t on the top 10 results – but now, even though you may not be listed on the left-hand side, searchers can very easily see a dot nearby their location, and may click on it to learn about your company.

So, take the time and add your business to Google Maps. While mobile functionality isn’t included in this update, it’s hopefully (you would think!) on the way. The closer you are to your searcher, the better chance of them choosing you for their business. And this new update gives some of the smaller guys that advantage.

The mobile web is moving mainstream with everyone launching mobile websites. Methods for optimizing these websites are still in their infancy. Search engine optimization for mobile websites is not very different from standard SEO practices.

Standards for proper mobile website design are still being established and won’t be mature for some time. Standards for mobile search are even less defined, but we do know what is working today.

1. Create mobile friendly content.
2. Get spidered and indexed by mobile search engines.

The focus on the mobile web is on making the user experience easy and simple.

Accessibility: Follow W3C Mobile website design best practices and the dotMobi web developers guide to ensure the best user experience. This will ensure that your content is accessible to anyone regardless of their platform.

Keep it simple: Design a simple site structure with clear navigation.  Keep the content clean, short and easy to read on a cell phone. Avoid designing sites deeper than 3 layers.

Validated XHTML Code: Use only 100% valid XHTML 1.0 code. It is likely that WML will be phased out in the future as a coding language. Make it easy for the search engines to access your mobile website. Mobile search engines have trouble crawling and indexing invalid code.

Mobile Sitemap: Search engines need to know your mobile website exists in order to spider it.

1. Google Mobile Sitemaps
2. Yahoo Mobile Submit

Links: Each page of your mobile website should have at least one incoming link. From your home page link to a sitemap page. This sitemap should include links to all other pages to help the mobile spiders index and rank your content.

SEO Best Practices: Follow standard SEO best practices such as major keywords in the title tag, H1’s and body text, keyword-rich anchor text for internal links and the content itself. You will have much less text but the text that is there must be keyword rich.

There isn’t a separate web for mobile devices to plug into.  It is the same web that desktops use. It is the mobile device that has special requirements. The “mobile web” is the web as viewed through a mobile phone.

Mobile devices require simpler websites, smaller in size and with few graphics. These are versions of websites that are compatible with the limited capabilities and small screens of cell phones. A separate mobile website is needed to deliver an optimized experience for mobile users.

Bandwidth: The mobile web is lighter than the normal web because of technology limitations. Desktops connect to the internet through a stable more robust connection. Mobile devices by their nature have to connect on the move.  Connections are transferred from cell-tower to cell-tower and are affected by carrier coverage.  This makes mobile devices limited in terms of bandwidth.

Device types: Devices used to connect to the mobile web vary widely. This creates challenges to create website for phones with different capabilities, features and restrictions. W3C and the mobile industry have been working to standards and best practices to improve the ability for cell phones to view web content.

Audience: People who use the mobile web do have different needs. They view the web on the go. In general there are needs a mobile user will be one of the following.

1. Urgent: Looking find something specific fast. This may be directions or a place to eat.
2. Bored: Casual surfing while commuting or between meetings.
3. Repetitive: Looking for the same type of information over and over such as weather, traffic reports or stock quotes.

In a previous blog post, I wrote about Google’s free tool to check out every stat under the sun for a website, Google Analytics. Today, we’re going to dive a bit deeper and try to use Google’s amazing tool for a specialized purpose. While looking at where in the world your website visits are coming from, the browser and OS of your visitors and at what resolution your visitor’s screen is set at is pretty entertaining, we’re going to utilize Google Analytic’s powerful tool to track strategies and increase profits.

Let’s say you run a blog, and after taking a look at a couple of weeks of data, a glaring problem is that nobody is contacting you. You can see some traffic, but you have hardly anyone contact you via your contact form. While making a conscious effort to call for more correspondence in your postings, you can automatically see how many times visitors used your contact form and easily see which day they occurred and continue to use that strategy to encourage people to contact you.

Setting up a goal requires a “Goal URL.” Luckily, after somebody fills out your contact form it takes them to a page signifying success. Use this “success” page as your “Goal URL” and make the “Match Type” an “Exact Match” to be able to track when visitors reach this page.

Google Analytics also allows for more in-depth tracking of goals, including what’s called the “funnel.” Essentially following users step-by-step (or in this case, url-by-url), it tracks when during the process a visitor left the site and much more.

This could be useful if you’re using Adwords to run a pay-per-click campaign; you can use landing pages as a starting point to see if a visitor follows the process you’ve set up from first page to sale successful page. Using this “funnel” process, you can determine which Adwords campaigns are successful and which are costing you money without providing any results.

I’ve really only scratched the surface. Almost anything is possible using the “Goals” tool in Google Analytics – you can set up goals looking to improve conversion rates, “quality” visits, as well as the rate of people leaving after a small amount of time.

Does anyone else have great key performance indicators they would like to share? Any additional insight?

More and more people are accessing websites from their mobile phones but this experience can be frustrating. Most Web sites were not designed to be used cell phones with their small screen, smaller keyboard and no mouse.

There are about 4 billion mobile phones in the world. This is about four times the numbers of PC’s. The potential for marketing on the mobile web is much bigger than the traditional World Wide Web.

The number of web enabled cell phones is growing. A new generation of 3G phones with web browsers are quickly replacing the older cell phones. Smart phones such as the iPhone and Blackberry Storm offer PC like functionality and are growing in popularity. New “flat rate” data plans have made web access by mobile phones more affordable.

Businesses are responding by quickly developing mobile websites to take advantage of this growing market.

Two mobile website options

1. Place your mobile website on a sub-domain of your main website. (m.domain.com).
2. Purchase a .mobi name  and place your mobile website there (domain.mobi)

Two ways to create your first mobile website.

1. Find a mobile Web developer who can build your mobile website from scratch.
2. Use a mobile website template such as mobiCreate.com or site.mobi.

As you create your mobile website, design and structure your website around your mobile visitor. They are looking for fast access to short bits of content. You will want to use short, direct sentences. Keep your content brief and to the point. Navigation and number of pages should be streamlined.
Think about the most important things your visitor is looking for and give them easy access to that information. Make it useful for your mobile visitor.

Acknowledgement: This information was taken from the eBook on mobilethinking.com

Is your website mobile friendly? When visiting a website on a mobile phone, there is nothing more frustrating than waiting for a site to load that contains large images or having too large of a page to read on your mobile phone.  Simple navigation and typing become critical when using the small screen.

Mobile websites should be designed to be small, simple and distilled down to their most crucial aspects.

Mobile websites are frequently viewed on screens as small as 1.1 x 1.4 inches (176 x 220) such as the Sony Erickson in the picture to the right. Lack of space on the small screen and slower Internet connections requires presenting only the most important information.
Mobile web design involves keeping the content clean, short and easy to read on a cell phone. Graphics should be few and very small, adding just an accent.

How many navigation links should you have on a page? Scrolling a page with many links on it can be very cumbersome because the scrolling action on many mobile devices selects each link in turn.  Fewer are better. 3-10 links are considered normal for a mobile web page. The design should be a balance between a large number of navigation links on a page and the need to navigate multiple layers within a website to reach information. A visitor should never have to drill down more than 4 layers.

Web page content must be reduced to the bare essentials so visitors have access only to what is most needed. Choosing only what is most important requires you to select only critical parts of your main website. The content presented on a mobile website should be the highest priority information to the average mobile visitor.

Most Internet searches from mobile phones are for local businesses. These are people looking for a restaurant to eat at, driving directions to a store or a movie schedule at the local theater. Sadly, most local businesses have not developed a website that can be viewed well on a cell phone. Mobile friendly websites are very different than those viewed on desk top computers.

Mobile Internet searches are growing

1. Internet searches from mobile phones grew 104% in 2008 over 2007 in the US; this is according to ComScore.
2. 40 million Americans or 16% of all U.S. mobile users, browse the Internet with their phone according to Nielsen Mobile.
3. Over 50% of all Internet searches will happen from mobile devices by the year 2020 according to Pew Internet.

Why mobile websites have to be different.

1. Variety of screen sizes:  See the picture above. Screen sizes vary tremendously from the small 128 x 160 to the much larger 320 x 480 used by many of the smart phones with touch screens.  Graphics from standard websites are way too large to fit on these screens.
2. Fewer and smaller images: With smaller screens and the slower connection speeds, images must be eliminated or greatly reduced.
3. Smaller pages need less text (Approx 50 words or less per page) and fewer pages. Content that is displayed, must be highly prioritized.
4. Few cell phones support older web technologies such as Frames, tables or even Flash animations.

Mobile websites are generally specially designed to be compatible with the special requirements of mobile devices. Local businesses that are not adding mobile versions of their website, are missing out on a growing market segment.