Web site addresses: technical communications
A project to increase the visibility of UK technical communications professionals in search engine results by using web site addresses that are related to the products and services that technical communicators sell.
This web site is for you if you:
- Are a freelance technical communicator or business communicator in the UK (small companies are also welcome)
- Want to increase your company's visibility in search engines
- Believe that (often) the whole is more than the sum of the parts
URLs and products: a problem
Most freelance technical communicators have a web site. The domain name (web site address) usually reflects the company name, not the products and services that we sell. Observations indicate that other things being equal, a domain name that matches a search term will appear higher in search results than one that does not.
Say you produce user guides. At best, you could have one page with a URL such as www.xyzcompany.co.uk/user-guide.htm. Much better would be the domain name www.user-guide.co.uk—but there are problems with this:
- Only one company can have that domain name.
- If you have the domain name, what do you do about all the other products and services that you sell?
- If you sell only one product (say user guides), how do you deal with your customers' perceptions? A potential customer might search for 'user manual'.
- If you have a set of domain names that reflects every product and service, you need different content on each web site, otherwise search engines will consider the sites as spam.
- If you use URL masking to link to a single site, search engines will not index the domains which use URL masking, so back to square one.
Solution: collaboration between professionals
One solution is collaboration between industry professionals. We create a set of "buyers' guides" for potential purchasers of technical communication services. Each product or service has its own web site (for example user-guide.co.uk, technical-writing.co.uk) When a purchaser uses a term (say, 'technical writing') in a search engine, the web site that relates to the term (technical-writing.co.uk) should be high in the list of results.
Contributors to the project have web links to their company web site, thus raising the profile of the contributors.
Note 1. This is not in competition with www.qualityauthors.co.uk, it's in addition to it. It's another way for technical communicators to be found.
Note 2. The collaboration is open to anyone with a bona-fide interest, whatever their affiliation (or not) with the various technical communication societies.
Note 3. Business communication services are often closely related to technical communication services. Many technical writers often work in both sectors. If you work exclusively with business communications, you are welcome to contribute to the www.business-communication-services.co.uk project.
Are you interested in working on this project? Have you got suggestions? If yes, first read this web site to learn more about the project, then contact Mike Unwalla.