A great website’s no good unless it gets lots of visitors and keywords are a really important way to help people find your site. There’s a bit of an art to getting the perfect amount of keywords in just the right place – but let us help you get it right!

What are keywords anyway?

When customers are looking for a business, service or product using a search engine they enter a phrase describing what they are looking for, known as a ‘keyword’ or ‘query’, into a search engine, which then generates a list of websites containing that keyword.   The results are often referred to as ‘SERPS’ – search engine results pages.

Search engines send ‘spiders’ to visit websites, which crawl through the pages looking to see what keywords are contained in the text and HTML code.  This means that you want to make sure that your web pages contain the keywords that your target audience are searching for, so that the spider remembers and calls up your site if someone makes a relevant search.

The joy of keywords

Common keywords – like ‘shoes’ or ‘food’ – will generate literally billions of websites. The ideal situation is for your website to appear on the first page of results, since internet searchers are unlikely to look beyond the first couple of pages. For a small site, appearing on the first page of the search engine listings can be extremely difficult for competitive terms – but there are ways around this.

There are search terms which are less competitive, meaning that fewer websites are trying to appear for them – but they could help you attract exactly the kind of visitor your site was built for. For example, the website of a Dorset youth club’s football team might not appear at the top of the listings when someone searches for ‘football club’, but will appear if someone searches for ’Dorset youth football'.  As the internet searcher is probably under 18, in the Dorset area and keen to practice their footie skills, there is a very good chance they are going to want the service the club offers. 

How many keywords?

Search engine spiders check for something called ‘keyword density’ – how often a keyword appears on a webpage. They will get suspicious if, for example, every other word is ‘youth football’. You want to aim for a keyword to appear a few times on a page, but not too much. The perfect ratio is that your keyword makes up between three and 7% of the total text. Consider what your visitors will think – the website is primarily for them, not the engines, so focus chiefly on writing good and useful content, with the chance to get a cheeky keyword in an added bonus!

Position the keywords well

Search engine spiders  always read from the top of the web page, and so recognise the content in the header as important – so your keyword should also appear in the web page’s header text (this is the bar that goes across the top of your website), as well as any paragraph titles and image descriptions.

So, on our imaginary youth club’s home page, they should include the phrase ‘Dorset youth football’ in their header and page titles.

Keywords and Mr Site

With a Mr Site package, it’s easy to add your keywords not only into your text but into your headers and image tags, using our ‘META tag’ tool. But if you ever have any questions – just get in touch and we’d love to give you further advice!

The great thing about using Mr Site is that you don’t need to be an IT whiz to create a great website – even if you know nothing about HTML you can achieve professional results. But if you’ve been thinking that you’d like to expand your technical knowledge and take your web-building skills to the next level – we’d love to help you get there and learning basic HTML is the place to start.

So what is HTML?

If you’re a bit of a newbie, then you’ve probably heard the word HTML being bandied about but are unsure what it means. HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It’s the language that website designers use to build websites – the code describes to the internet browser how a site should look and translates the instructions into visuals.

How do I use it?

If you want to tell the internet browser that you want a page to look a certain way, you need to use the right code. So, for example, you are writing a piece of content and want to split the text into two paragraphs.  At the point you want to separate the text, you need to tell the browser that a new paragraph is starting and when it ends.  The code for this is <p> - the ‘p’ stands for ‘paragraph’ – and it’s the part of the code known  as an HTML tag. The brackets are called ‘angle brackets’.

So, the text would need to read

<p>This is paragraph 1</p>

<p>This is paragraph 2</p>

The / indicates the end of the HTML instruction – don’t forget to include it whenever you finish a piece of code; it’s like a full stop.

Using HTML with Mr Site Takeaway Website

With Takeaway Website, you can build your website in one of three modes – Simple, Creative or Advanced.  If you’re just getting started with HTML, we recommend that you use Creative mode. Just click on the HTML button at the bottom left-hand side of your screen and you can start adding your code.  If you’ve already added anything to the page, you’ll see how this translates into HTML.

Common coding

We’ve covered creating paragraphs, but there’s a huge amount more you can do with HTML. For now, we’ll go through three very basic HTML codes:

        Headers
To create a header on a webpage, you need to use this code:
<h1>I’ve made a header!<h1>
If you want to create a secondary header underneath it – so it looks smaller – the numbers change, all the way to size 6 font:
<h2>Now a smaller header<h2>

       Adding links to a page
When you type your content and want to add a link you can of course just type in the full website address of the page you want to link to. But if the address of the page is long – or even just to make your site look more professional – then you can also turn a piece of content into a hyperlink (a word or phrase website visitors click on to be taken to a particular page).
The code for this is:
<a href="http://www.mylink.com" >click here</a>
You can add whatever web address you want between ‘’ and ‘’ – and whatever word or phrase you want between > and <

        Images
You can add an image to your webpage using the tag <img>. You also need to include the tag ‘scr’, which helps the browser find the right image.
The total code looks like this:
<img src=http://www.mywebsite.co.uk/USERIMAGES/myimage.jpg />
The internet address within the tags is where the browser can find the image – when you upload an image onto your Takeaway Website it is saved in a file called www.websitename.co.uk/USERIMAGES. You are asked to give the image a title (myimage) and the last bit of the address above describes what kind of file it is, in our example a jpg. Image files can be jpgs or gifs – make sure you put the right ending on the image address when you write your code.
You should also add a text description to your image, known as an ‘alt’ tag. This explains what the image is of, in case the image ever doesn’t show up, and helps search engines and the blind using screen reader devices identify it.
This code looks like this:
<img scr=http://www.mywebsite.co.uk/USERIMAGES/myimage.jpg alt=”This is my image”>

Learn more....

That’s just very, very basic coding – there is so much more you can learn. Whatever you want to do with your site, it’s just a matter of finding the code. We highly recommend Lynda, a website that’s got some great teaching resources to help you become an HTML expert.
If you want a more old-school teaching guide, then the ‘Dummies’ series of guides has a good one on HTML, called, unsurprisingly, HTML, XHTML and CSS for Dummies

If you’re new to Mr Site, here are few hints to for when you building your website with Takeaway Website…

1. The first page of your website, the homepage, should always be kept as clean and professional looking as possible. Build it using ‘Change Content’ but save your shop pages, contact form, blog page etc. for your other pages. 

2. Do try to read and work through our easy instruction manual as you build your website – it will probably save you time and uncertainty. If you don’t have a manual or would like an updated copy, you can download it from www.mrsite.co.uk/support

3. You can select and re-select the ‘Choose a Design’ option as many times as you need to. This means you can experiment with various designs before your decide on your final one.

4. Changing the look of your navigation menu (found either on the top or down the side of your website) can have a dramatic effect on the overall look of your site. Why not find out how to make yours look a-class by clicking here.

5. Take things slowly whilst you are getting familiar with your Takeaway Website package – make small changes and evaluate them as you go along. Try to avoid doing lots of work and then finding the result is not what you want.

6. NEVER EVER copy and paste your text content from a Word document. Doing this will add hidden HTML code, that can have a negative effect on the appearance of your website.
Always copy your text from Word into Notepad, then copy it from Notepad into your Takeaway Website.

7. When building pages using ‘Change Content’ option, if you select ‘Creative mode’ you will notice a number of icon symbols similar to those found in Microsoft Word. These buttons can help you make your website look really professional – find out more about what they do by clicking here.

A domain name (website name) is a unique Internet address. It is very important to select the right name for domain registration. 

Your domain name, not only reflects your business, the industry you are in and the country in which you operate. It is your customers' first point of contact because it forms the basis of your email and web site addresses. It is your company’s identity on the world wide web (www). For example: Website: www.yourbusinessname.co.uk and Email: sales@yourbusinessname.co.uk

A unique name is your first step in joining the Internet community and Mr Site's Takeaway website will help you in securing your website address and creating your website. And why not think about getting a second domain name for your website - just click here to find out more details about how you can register more than one name for your website.

Budding musicians looking for an easy way to share music online should look no further.  Perhaps you're already using it, or have stumbled across it - but SoundCloud offer hosting and sharing of your musical creations absolutely free.  It's quick and easy to set up an account & upload music - and even better - it won't take up any of your Mr Site web hosting space, leaving you more room for other fun things to add to your website.

Sharing your music from SoundCloud is quick and painless, with the added benefit of giving you some basic statistics of how many people have listened to your creations.  Simply copy and paste the embed code into one of your pages in the Mr Site 'Change content' editor and you'll sharing your music in no time.

So what are you waiting for?  Visit SoundCloud now and start sharing your music on your Takeaway Website.