Your website lets the world access you.(News)

BYLINE: Andrew Parker

Last Thursday was my mom's birthday, and thanks to Google I was able easily to locate the telephone number and e-mail address of a favourite local florist who helped to make her day special. If the florist hadn't set up its own website, the business would have gone elsewhere - because I'm currently in London, so the internet is the first place I'm likely to look for something back home. The same could be said of a property owner based abroad: how would he or she typically find a local tiler, painter or plumber? Chances are it's going to start with a web search - that's why many of these types of businesses now have websites and are expanding their horizons.

Some simple but effective examples of this type of service industry website include www.tapchap.com and www.dial-a-plumber .co.za. I located these easily, sitting in the UK, by searching for "plumbers Durban" and "plumbers Cape Town" respectively.

Choose a name: A domain has to be unique on the web: otherwise, given more than one option, a web browser wouldn't know which site to open. This is why "TLDs" or Top Level Domains exist. In South Africa, the ".co.za" TLD is very common, allowing, for example, www.cnn.co.za to be differentiated from www.cnn.com. Strictly speaking, ".co.za" is meant to be used by companies (co) in South Africa (za), although in reality anyone anywhere can register this TLD. Sites that end with .com are typically US-based sites, but this TLD's association is so desirable that sites from all over the world use .com. For a full list of top level domains and their implied associations, see www.tinyurl.com/tld22.

Registering a site's domain name is very easy actually. You can use an all-in-one hosting, design and registrar service like www.home stead.com, or a local registrar with basic site builder tools like Hetzner at www.hetzner .co.za. Basic hosting starts at just R19 a month. Another excellent hosting and site-building service is Siteground at www.siteground .com. They offer a live demo of their easy site building tools and templates, and their hosting charges start at around $6 (R55) a month.

Note that you can register a domain with any internet registrar, but host your website elsewhere, or move it there later, subject to some conditions - it's your choice how you want things set up. The registration just ensures that anyone who links to or visits your website's address will be directed to the appropriate web server - which is provided by the hosting company.

Search Optimisation: Sites are usually found using web searches, and to be effective, a site needs to be near the top of a list of search results. Professional services exist to help fine-tune this process. An example is Intoweb at www.intoweb.co.za, who recently designed braai king Cadac's website at www.cadac.co.za. If you're going it alone, there are some basic rules to remember. Include keywords that search engines like Google will index and use to list your site according to how relevant it is to a user's search. Try to list words that would appear in solutions as well as listing typical excerpts from a web searcher's questions. Think of words associated with the solutions you provide, and incorporate them in your website's text.

For example, a Franschhoek-based paint and decorating shop might use phrases such as "offer paint colour matching and tinting to any custom colour" as well as listing keywords such as Franschhoek, PVA, painting, paint, enamel, rollers, sandpaper, hardware, etc.

You can find more good tips about keywords and search optimisation at www.tinyurl.com/seo11.