“Can you include this list of keywords in the meta tags so my website ranks in the search engines.”

It still surprises me when a new client asks this question — and I’ve made it my life goal to hunt down and lambast the last remaining person who is pushing this concept!

Search engines have ignored this tag ever since the first SEO folk began stuffing it with irrelevant yet amusingly hopeful keywords. That was 1999. Let the thing die.

When linking to a file that a website visitor can download, there are a few common courtesies you should follow.

• Make the file available in a format that does not require the visitor to own particular software
• List the file type and file size beside the link so the visitor knows what they need to view it and how long it will take to download
• If special software is required, such as Adobe Acrobat Reader for PDF files, provide a link to install that software

If the file is a whitepaper, information pack, etc., you should also ensure your business details (including contact details) are included: you’d be surprised how many businesses forget to do this, then frustrate their visitors who read a document weeks later and can’t figure out the author!

More people are accessing websites on their mobile phone, particularly as the price of data usage on mobile phones is decreasing. You might find that visitors only need to do simple things, such as find your phone number, but a website that is not built with mobile phone usage in mind can make even the simplest of tasks painful.

The easiest way to support mobile phones is to have your web developer create a stylesheet (css) specific for mobile phones. Then, needless parts of the website can be hidden, and colours, fonts and layout elements can be altered to make the website fit nicely on a very small screen.

If your website is larger and more complex, and each page consumes substantial bandwidth just to view, then you might choose to create a separate mobile phone version of your website. A common standard is to use a subdomain called ‘m’, so your URL would be http://m.example.com. You might choose to present just a sub-set of your website’s content on this URL, but ideally, it would be identical to your normal website in content, but have a custom display suitable for mobile phones.

If you need to accept payments for goods or services through your website, the easiest way for your customer is to accept credit cards.

Some options to accept credit cards through your website are:

• Implement a third-party merchant facility, such as PayPal. Integration is very cheap, because you link to PayPay’s website where your customer enters their credit card details. This solution is not as professional, but is quick and cheap to implement.
• Ask for credit card details using a secure form, and have these encrypted and stored in an area where you can view them. You then process the credit cards manually through your EFTPOS terminal or virtual terminal provided by your bank. This option is relatively inexpensive to implement, but requires you to manually process the payment each time.
• Integrate directly with your bank’s credit card gateway (most will have this service.) It will involve more programming than the other options, but allows you to both offer instant payment and keep the customer entirely on your website. It is also generally the cheapest option as you only pay the fees charged by your bank.

Choosing the most appropriate option depends on the nature of your business, sales volume and budget.

There are several legitimate reasons to own multiple domain names relating to the one website. You might own both the .com and .com.au (or equivalent) to protect others from registering them and causing confusion; popular misspellings to capture visitors who type in your domain name incorrectly, or other domain names that you use to track various offline marketing campaigns.

The best way to handle these is to choose a single, primary domain name. Choose the domain name that the search engines seem to know about (i.e. you search for your business name; the first result that appears is the domain that the search engines primarily associate with your website.) Then, redirect all other domain names to this primary domain. The best type of redirect in this situation is a “permanent redirect”, also known as a “301 redirect”. Your web developer will be able to achieve this for most websites by using what’s known as a “.htaccess file”. Avoid redirects that involve placing code in an HTML page; search engines struggle with these.

“Parking” domain names to your primary website is an easier option, and is usually okay, provided no other website refers to the other domain names. Otherwise, search engines will pick those up, and become confused by the apparent duplicate websites. But to be safe, apply a redirect.