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Here are some other reasons why your business should implement Search Engine Marketing SEO services into your website:

1. To rank higher than your competitors has surely got to be the number one reason.
2. Reduces the cost of other forms or advertising as most people now are looking online first.
   The Internet is the fastest growing sales channel – Google Adwords, Google Plus and search engine optimisation (SEO) are leading the charge. People and businesses are using search engines to make their buying and purchasing decisions. If you want more customers, your business needs to include search engine marketing, Google maps and SEO in their budget. Good quality directories can sometimes help, however these are generally expensive and include some pay per click advertising included.
3. Reach customers for less with SEO – The cost of pay per click through programs such as Adwords is increasing all the time. By increasing investment in search engine optimisation you become less dependent on Google Adwords for website visits. Effective SEO will increase the amount of organic traffic to your website and ultimately reduce your cost of gaining new customers.
4. Targeted Search Engine Marketing – Natural search engine traffic through search engine optimisation as compared to pay per click traffic provides a highly qualified visitor. This results in SEO delivering higher sales lead conversion rates, plus increasing the average amount of time a user spends on your website.
5. People want to buy local and you need local optimisation to reach local clients. This is called Google Maps or now called Places.

RCS Websites Search Engine Optimisation Service helps major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing understand that your website has what people want.

I don't know how many times I have sat down with a client, asked how they think they are ranking in the search engines and get the answer "number one", then I realise they are just putting in there business name and searching for it. For some reason people think there business name is a good search term to use, its not and here is why.

Obviously you need to rank for your business name, but this will happen naturally without much effort. So rather that searching in Google for your business name and seeing how it ranks and decided this is good enough. Also consider that these are users who actually know who you are already or know your business name already, this is a perfect scenario. However what SEO targets is potential clients who don’t know who you are yet and are looking for particular products or services. An example of this would be "Restaurants in your location". Unless you know the name of the restaurant and are just looking for there contact details, you'd most likely look for a restaurant in that location and maybe even the style of restaurant ie "Seafood Restaurant in Terrigal", or "Steak Restaurant Erina".

RCS Websites have put together an extremely cheap starter website for Tradies. Perfect to get you started and without all the bell and whistles. We will also include it for small start up businesses like restaurants and cafes to get you started online and the whole system can always be upgraded later. Yes this is a fully upgradable website.

Click here to open the information pdf file

Contact us about this awesome offer

So you are looking for a new website or an upgrade to your current website and you have no idea where to start. Without a recommendation from a client, friend or work colleague you have nothing really to go off except for price and maybe the look of the website designers online business which is subject to personal opinion and design style. Relationships are everything in business so you can build trust, knowing that the website company is working in your best interest. 

The actual process of putting a website online is simple. Costs increase when you want custom solutions such as branding, logos, content, images, search engine optimisation, responsive designs etc.
 

If you want to increase your bookings, reservations, and ultimately your profits, you have to hire and work with the best designer for your website. Hiring an amateur will only prove to be more expensive than hiring a professional and an experienced one. But finding the best out there might be tedious and challenging. Sometimes, it might even cost you your brand.

So how can I really find and screen the best designers out there?

You don’t need to be a techie during the interview process, nor spend too much time working on the finer details of the designer’s capabilities and experiences. What you actually need is to understand the basics of web design and how these basics relate to your own business brand.

I list a few important and interesting considerations below that you need to understand, integrate, and conceptualise in order to come up with the most attractive website to represent your brand online. You can simply screen your website designer according to these criteria:

Online Objective

• What’s exactly your objective in bringing your brand to the online world?
• How do you exactly want your website to look?

When it comes to design, some business owners tend to go beyond what is needed and necessary, eventually ignoring the fundamental requirement of building the most suitable website for their brand. A good website designer however, will prioritise your objectives and builds your website according to a hierarchy of what needs to be implemented and what aren’t. Your website designer understands that your website must portray the personality of your service industry (hotel, restaurant, etc.) without looking like an exaggerated and elaborate art project. You must consider your website as a ticket booth instead of carnival rides; otherwise you’ll be compromising the functionality and user interface. Thinking in such a way will allow you to formulate your main objectives without compromising each aspect of your website.

Always remember that your main online objective is to treat your website as a conversion platform that can increase your reservations, bookings, and ultimately gain more profits.

Quality Design Means More Profits
Design is not always about art. In today’s growing multitudes of websites that represent various businesses and industries, quality design means more profits. According to one of the biggest search engines, Google, 96% of travelers started their planning via online search. This only means that you can tap these 96% and build your client database from this figure. The only way to convert these travelers to become your clients is to build quality designs for your website and the first step is to impress them. The good news is that you can certainly control your website for them to have the good first impression that last about your website.

Quality design covers several factors and these factors are discussed below.

Homepage – First Impressions That Last
Your website designer understands that the first page that your soon-to-be guests or clients see on your website is your homepage. For this very reason, you must create the first impression that lasts on your homepage. With a single blink of an eye, your client will either leave or stay on your website. Your clients will judge your brand - your business - based on how your homepage design caters to their needs. Your website’s homepage must consider the following:

• Photography – Flash or static images must be prominently positioned on your homepage. Your best shots of the best facilities and venues of your premises must be presented in a dramatic theme that touches your guests’ emotions – in a way that captivates your guests and seduces them to make a reservation or booking. You can also include photos and images of happy and satisfied clients.
• Compelling Contents – Incorporate compelling text contents on the homepage. Hire a professional copywriter or do it yourself if you want the best combination of marketing and writing skills. Include testimonials of your past clients along with their best photos. Describe the advantages of your venue among the competition. Include all the special and exclusive experiences that they can get during their stay, which can include the unique services you offer, nearby attractions, and transportation convenience among other things.
• Easy and Accessible Sitemap – The major pages (Contact Us Page, Blog, Reservation/Booking Page, etc.) of your website must be clearly and easily accessible on the homepage. One of the most important pages that you must provide on a button on your homepage is the booking or reservation page. Your guests should not be spending too much time on how to book and make a reservation on your hotel. This function must be incorporated conspicuously on the homepage.
• Contact Us Link - There will be guests who have other concerns and issues that they want to clarify first before deciding to make a reservation. Make sure that your Contact Us page is also prominent on the homepage to cater to this particular aspect.

Dramatic Theme – Setting the Mood
So you have integrated several of your best photography on your homepage. The rest of the pages of your website must also include pretty images of the rooms, your hotel’s grounds or gardens, services – you must show-off the best images of your place to portray the personality of your brand. Along with these pretty images, you can also include a soothing music to perfect the dramatic theme of your website. This nice combination of images and sound sets the mood of your guests and will certainly lead them to make a reservation/booking.

Do not limit the attractions of your website by using images alone.

Language Support – Expanding Your Reach Internationally
Since you are in the hospitality industry/business, chances are that you will be catering to international guests. Your website must integrate a language support to as many languages as possible. This will also expand the reach of your client database to include other nationalities other than those speaking the majority of the English language.

Always remember that the information you provided on your website using the English language must exactly be the same information translated to other major languages to increase the possibility of a guest making a reservation.

Responsive Design – Improving Your Website’s User Experience
When you really want a quality design, your website designer will cover a lot of aspects for your website. One very important aspect is the fact that your guests will be using various browsers (IE, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, etc.) and devices (smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc.). If your website is designed to a specific and fix resolution, then there will certainly be problems sooner or later. In order to avoid any issues on your website, your designer can implement a responsive design that is capable of accommodating any type of browser and almost any kind of devices. A responsive design helps your guest to have a consistent good experience on your website.

SEO Friendly – Adhere to Search Engines’ Rules
A quality design for your website also includes and implements proper on-page SEO (search engine optimization). Even if your website designer implemented all the above factors but failed to integrate a proper on-page SEO, your site will be useless. The purpose of SEO is for your website to have an online presence – for your target audience to notice you when they search online. In most cases however, SEO is done by another person and a good website designer cooperates to the SEO person to bring about a quality design that matches the SEO requirements for the entire website.
On the other hand, a bad web designer can implement “black hat SEO” tactics that can help your website to rank faster on search engines. The only downside is that your website might be penalized by search engines. Because of these unaccepted black hat SEO tactics, you might loss all your investment and your brand might not even be shown on the search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.).

Other Considerations
There are certainly many factors to include in your website such as:

• Detailed Description of All Services
• Reservations and Booking Facility/System
• Locations And The Use of Local Listings
• Website Technology (HTML5 or CMS platform)
• Testing and Redesign

However, the factors that are briefly discussed above are essentially what you need to know to start looking for the best web designer out there. If you are still hesitant and want to know more details in order to perfect the presentation of your brand to the online world, you can always consult Robert Corse-Scott from RCS WEBSITES.

Always remember that hiring a professional is always affordable than hiring an inexperienced, or a cheaper, or an amateur web designer. Don’t settle for the less, choose the best by hiring the best web designer who understands your needs and requirements.

At RCS Websites, your website is our business. We don’t consider your website finished and successful until you are satisfied with the profits that you are earning from your website.

I’ve been asked many times about the most suitable CMS for any website. Over the years, I have always been relying on a CMS for the ease of installation and updates on my site. I realised early on that Joomla was the best and has many things to offer and I do believe that it is a complete package, which is full of functionality perfect for any small or large website. In fact, the term “Joomla” literally means “as a whole” or “all together” and that is what the CMS platform is really capable of keeping everything in one place so you can update it easily. While WordPress basically caters to blogging, Joomla caters to a variety of websites other than blogs. If you’re a newbie to building websites but don’t have the deeper technical knowledge and skills to implement complex website elements, then Joomla is the perfect tool that you need for your CMS or Content Management System.

I summed up some of the advantages or benefits of using Joomla. These factors might help you understand more about the software:

• Built on a template system we custom design branded Joomla templates or code website templates designed from your graphic artist or branding company. 
• Login and update simple updates in a matter of seconds yourself so you have no update costs.
• Extra Functionality – Use Joomla if you want to build a website that focuses on blogging and later on decides to expand your reach to promote audience or visitor interactions. Joomla has a wide variety of functionalities that you cannot find in other CMS platforms. In fact, Joomla is best for managing newsletters, ecommerce sites, website registrations, forums, multimedia, and other user generated content.
• Integration of Complex Website Structure – Unlike other CMS platforms, Joomla supports more than 2 levels of hierarchies. This feature is best for websites that accommodate more content and pages such as forums and authority websites.
• URL Simplicity – Joomla provides a simpler URL for all the pages of your site. This is because Joomla powered websites do not use any search string queries when it comes to URL titles. This is a big advantage when you are doing SEO tactics to rank the pages of your site because search engines can easily crawl and index the URLs of all the pages of your website.
• Extensions and Plugins – In Joomla, you do not need to use as many plugins compared to WP websites. Joomla websites have functionality already integrated in the platform so there is no need for a bunch of plugins. However, if you want to add more extensions such as calendars, blogging tools and chatting, newsletters integrations, etc, you can select from a wide array of extensions which ranges to more than 6000 functionalities.
• Open Source – Joomla is also an open design platform. You can host your site to any hosting company. This simply means that you own your content and can transfer all the pages of your website if you want and any time you want. 

There are lots of discoveries that you can use when using Joomla and the possibilities are endless. You can experiment while enjoying the portability and comfort of conveniently designing your website without restrictions and limitations.

If you want to know more about how to install Joomla to improve the functionality of your website, then drop me a line or two and I’ll be glad to help.

Content creation is the fundamental aspect of any SEO campaign. For the past years, the accepted notion is mainly focused on the technical aspect of the content such as:

1. Keyword density and frequency
2. Keyword placement
3. Words count
4. Meta keywords and tags

This notion is mainly attributed to the fact that contents were written for search engines, and not for the readers. However, Google and other search engines were able to improve and changed the landscaped of SEO and provide better search results for the readers.

Local search engine optimisation is one way of reaching out to your customers, especially if you are targeting a specific geographical location. Most of the customers nowadays are using the ROBO (Research Online, Buy Offline) technique. Your local search engine optimisation strategy can either make or break your local business.
 

Here are some quick tips to get you started with local SEO:
 

SEO is the short term for search engine optimisation. But what is negative SEO? As the term suggest, it’s the opposite of SEO. Negative SEO is the process of de-ranking a site by using the so called black hat method. This process is usually directed to a competitor site. The main goal of negative SEO is to rank a site by de-ranking a competitor site. However, the impact of negative SEO has been a big debate in the SEO community up to this day. Others claim that they had been affected by negative SEO and that their sites were toppled from Google page 1 to 10.
 

Can Competitors Really Hit My Site By Doing Negative SEO?
 

Traffic means everything for an online business. There are two ways to generate traffic online, either SEO or PPC. When you’re doing SEO, you are ranking keywords in your site naturally to get what is typically referred as free traffic from search engines. This usually takes weeks or several months depending on the type and competition of the keyword you are ranking for. Most companies hire SEO consultants for this very reason. On the other hand, PPC is not free. If you want your site to appear on top of the search results, you need to pay a certain amount to the search engines, which is much like paying a TV station for an ad commercial. Both methods are proven to give results and sometimes, are used together for better performance.

PPC can be very rewarding. Here are several reasons why you need a PPC campaign:

E-commerce sites are usually dull and boring. Because ecommerce sites usually offer the same products, images and descriptions from the manufacturers are usually recycled from site to site. This raises a red flag on Google. Thus, the typical challenge of these sites is how to turn these images and descriptions into something more unique and link-worthy.

Here are 6 important changes that will turn your boring product page into great content:

Buy Cheap Ink Online

I found this website for suppling ink and toner for printers today.
Worth while trying out and the price was good.

Try them and leave some feedback in the comments. 

If you haven't noticed everyone seems to be on a mobile phone browsing the internet looking for products and services before they make a decision to buy.

Without getting to technical several things are going on here and if your website or at least the most popular pages on your website are not displaying correctly then you will be missing out on business.

Check for yourself how your website is displaying on mobile devices, if your content is hard to read, or if you have to scroll across the page then you may have a problem. 

According to the search engines website traffic from mobile devices is exploding and most of the searches for these devices is for local products and services. 

RCS Websites create mobile landing pages that are displayed automatically to anyone viewing your website on a mobile device and most new website packages come with the ability to enable mobile support.

View our new website on an iPhone or Android for an example www.rcswebsites.com.au and contact us for a quote.  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Businesses are now competing in a global marketplace and in order to level the playing field against the large multinational corporations they must have a superior online presence. It is not enough to simply have a website; it requires so much more than that.

What the team at RCS Websites does is speak one on one with the business owner to fully grasp the essence of that company. We then take that inspiration and convert it into a website that is appealing to the eye and can be found on the major search engines. Right at this very moment there are consumers on the search engines looking for what your company has to offer, and without being ranked prominently on the big search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing, your prospective clients are missing out on the chance of doing business with your company.

Food photography?

Need Food Photography for your Website?

Nicole Jones specialises in macro photography in the food arena, capturing Restaurant and Café food throughout Sydney, Central Coast and Hunter Regions. 

Nicole aims to provide clients with a solid range of food, product shots and stills that will give them ample resources to promote their businesses via the web or print media for an affordable price.

Contact Nicole on 0414 931 455

I came across this website today and it has some fantastic Photography Themes for Sale.

Perfect Templates for Photography Websites. Looks like they are very easy to customize so if you are looking for a website for your photography business at a reasonable price let me know and I am sure we can set something up at a great price. Basically you need to get a domain name registered, some hosting and then an install of WordPress, we will then set up the photography theme with your logo and business branding.

Content Management System or CMS is now getting very popular not only to programmers but even to online marketers who have the need to manage the content in their websites without having to go through a rigid technical web programming and development exposure. With the available tools in building a CMS, the ability to manage and control the information available in the site becomes easy. 

If you are interested in building a CMS for your site, it is important to be prepared with some specific requirements before the implementation. Below are some of the things that you should consider.

Many people say that creating a blog website is an easy thing that they can do online to generate thousands of dollars in revenues. Although it may sound a bit exaggerated, this is possible, especially now that the internet offers more earning opportunities to individuals and business owners alike. Regardless if you want to blog intended for personal use, or whether you have a website that talks about your business and / or promoting your products, blogging can generally help you because it allows you to create different text posts, images and announcements bringing the news to people from all over the world. People can see what you have in mind, or what you’re offering. If you’re a writer, you can enthusiastically show the world what’s on your mind – literally. Having said that, it only proves that blogging is one of the most essential things that an individual should learn doing online.

This article has been writing on which web design company website and is worth a read - 

The term ‘backlinks’ is often used in the context of search engine optimisation (SEO), but what on Earth does it mean? Backlinks are any incoming link to your website. They can come from other websites, online directories, and social media platforms. Search engines use them to help decide how important and relevant your website is to their users., and hence where to place it in their listings. To quote Google, “Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B.”

Does this mean we can increase our chances of getting listed at the top of Google by asking our contacts to link to our websites? Unfortunately, the answer is no. It is in fact not as simple as another website casting a vote for your website. For the vote to count, the other site has to be seen as important and relevant to Google’s users. It is very much as case of quality over quantity.

So how do you get good quality backlinks that impress search engines?

Local businesses wanting to get into a quality business directory should look no further than Visitor Directories

Visitor information, Newcastle, Hunter Valley, Central Coast for accommodation, restaurants, activities, what to do, where to eat, beaches, water activities, fishing and cruises.