Our thoughts, rants and inside knowlege of web design & development!
Posts tagged Search Engine Optimisation
Do larger website do better on Google?
Feb 2nd
Do larger website do better on Google?
Larger sites tend to be ranked more highly than smaller sites due to the amount of information they contain and because there are more pages to be ranked by the search engines. While not every site can be huge in size and shouldn’t aim to be – it’s important to add some sort of new pages to the site as fresh content helps your site keep its ranking and improve on it. Each month you should be adding new content using a company blog or else creating informative articles on a section of your site, which link back to products on your site. Another point of content creation is that the more optimised pages you have, the more often you mention your target keywords – which is a factor in you achieving high rankings for those keywords in search engines.
We perform competition comparison to show you how your website stacks up against the no 1 positioned websites on Google for each of your keywords. This will show the number of links they have and also the amount of pages listed on Google. This highlights the amount of work we need to undertake to compare More >
Local Business Listings & Testimonials
Feb 2nd
Local Business Listings & Testimonials
There are a number of different sites on the Internet where you can set up a local business profile page and receive reviews and testimonials from your past customers in order to promote your website / business. Some of these contain maps to your business and you can display your contact details, opening hours and products or services in your listing.
Using these listings improves your brand awareness and exposure of your website as well and the reviews you receive show that your previous customers were satisfied with your work.
Sites that we can use include Google Local, Which Local and Yelp.co.uk.
We are a London website design company that specialises in website planning, website design and website promotion. Call us to find out how we can work together to make your website work for you online.
On-Page Website Search Engine Optimisation
Jan 31st
On-Page Website Search Engine Optimisation
One of the first stages in optimising your website should be to consider how relevant the page titles, headings, images and other aspects of your site’s content are to both your visitors and the search engines which will categorise them. We use our keyword research to ensure the correct keywords are used in this process.
One or more main keyword is chosen for each page of your site and used to ensure your site is on topic. This is known as on-page optimisation. Generally, this is a one-time job for the site as a whole although new keywords can always be added or changes made to improve the site in the future – such as making sure that pages link to each other where appropriate (known as internal linking). Also any new pages for the site should be optimised in the same way when they are added.
Article Directory Submissions
Jan 27th
Article Directory Submissions
An extra way of boosting traffic to your website and increasing the links to your site is through the use of article directories. An article is created that relates to your site and then it is submitted to high ranking, high traffic article directories. These sites provide articles that can be republished by other sites for free – on their website pages, in emails, or elsewhere.
The benefit to you is that each article can contain at least one link to your site – which counts as a positive vote or recommendation of your site as far as search engines are concerned. An article you create may rank highly in a search engine because it is featured on the article site – bringing you extra traffic to your pages. Also, if it is republished, you receive visits from the new site’s audience and an extra link – or vote of confidence – for your own site.
Creating articles and submitting them to directories can be a simple and effective way of link building (creating links to your site) which can boost your rankings and draw in extra traffic as well.
We are a london website design company that specialises in website planning, More >
Understanding SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
Jan 27th
Understanding SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
When your website is first noticed by a search engine, it is scanned by a small computer program called a search engine ‘spider’ which collects important data about your site’s topic, relevance, quality and value. Then a ranking is assigned to your site based on how many other websites have already been found to contain information on your subject. Having good rankings, particularly in Google – the most commonly used search engine, makes the difference between your site being visible on the first page of searches and being visited by huge numbers of visitors a day to the worst case scenario of your site being lost amongst the last pages (if in the search engine at all) and never receiving a single visitor.
The search engine creators, especially at Google, are always updating the way that search engines rank sites in order to weed out sites that offer no quality or relevant information to visitors. In the early days of the search engines, it was common for rankings to be manipulated by using hidden text and code on websites to save time on making improvements to a website. This rarely works anymore and a long-term strategy More >
How to Check the Links to Your Website and Assess Their Value
Jan 12th
If you want your website to be at the top of Google, or any search engine, then one of the most important things you can do is aim to increase the number of links that are coming in to your website.
What this means on a basic level is that you need as many other websites as possible linking to you for search engines to value your site as one that is trusted and useful. Every other site that links to yours is counted as a positive vote when the search engines look at your site and rank it. That said, the links have more value if the sites linking to you are relevant (ie. on-topic and of reasonable quality).
Before you can start the often challenging process of trying to increase the number of links that are pointing to your site, you really need to check how many links you already have so that you can see how much work you need to do compared to outrank your competitors.
There are two main categories of links your site can attract: those that show as links in Google (very valuable links that can be difficult to get) and those that show as links More >
The real world role of social media: tuition fees debate
Dec 8th
You may have been following the UK tuition fees debate with some interest in the news, and seen how previously apathetic students have sprung into organised protests and occupations with surprising speed and ease. This is a great example of the role of social media in a practical context. Let’s take a look at how social networking has been used, and how it is relevant to the commercial world.
How do you know if anybody is coming to a protest? How do you know where to meet? The popular social network Facebook has been used extensively to organise protests across the country. Facebook ‘events’ have been set up with a wealth of information on dates, times, locations and attendees to organise their exploits. However, event pages are only useful up until that event starts. Which leads us to…
So when the march has started, how do such a large mass of people communicate? Twitter is the popular micro-blogging platform used by celebrities, politicians, businesses, charities, activists and everyday people – including students. When police attempted to use their controversial ‘kettling’ tactic a multitude of warnings would appear instantly on the site warning other protestors to change route. Occupations and sit ins have More >
Builders Website Design Example
Dec 1st
We are proud to launch this website design project for the North London Builders DCL – Direct Construction Ltd. The initial brief was to design the company logo / branding.
Once branding was complete we moved our focus onto the website design. We took the time to understand the clients services and planned the website content around this information, we provided 5 bespoke home page designs and this was the outcome. The website design is built inside the WordPress platform which means the blog was seemlessly integrated and future social media interaction will be simple and cost effective to implement.
Social media giant Facebook announces Single Sign-on, Places API, Deals, Mobile App Updates
Nov 4th
Popular social network Facebook announced a torrent of updates to its mobile products, namely four things: single sign-on, opening up its Places API, allowing businesses to attach deals to their Facebook Place page, and updates to its iPhone and Android apps.
Single Sign-on
Facebook are seeking to limit the amount of typing of long passwords and usernames that a user has to go through inside mobile apps by allowing integration with Facebook in a similar way to what you may see on many websites that you visit. People with the Facebook app installed on their smartphone will be able to log in to other mobile apps using their Facebook account, no giving up of private credentials necessary.
The Places API
Developers can now access the popular Places product to utilise in their own apps and websites. Places is a location based tools that allows Facebook users to ‘check in’ at locations and tag their friends, in a similar vein to location based social networks like Foursquare and Gowalla. The API allows developers to link their own products to this tool so that, for example, Foursquare check ins could be duplicated to Facebook Places. Developers will be able to read data from the tool, write More >
Blekko the alternative Search Engine which eliminates Spam
Nov 1st
Blekko a $24 million venture backed project which has been in the making for over 3 years has been launched its pubic BETA version. With this initial roll out Blekko are also releasing several new features for both mainstream and the sites super users.
Blekko is designed to eliminate spam searches using its proprietary slash tag technology. Basically the search engine checks all queries to see if they fall within one of seven main categories, health, colleges, autos, personal finance, lyrics, recipes and hotels. Every search that is made that is recognised to be in one of these categories Blekko technology will assign the correct slash tag and display only results that are relevant to the search.
Webmasters and Blekko super users are able to apply slashtags to their URL’s so that Blekko can read them , this is aimed at stopping spam results such as huge link farms and bad neighborhood sites which are not maintained.
Don’t panic if your business does not fall within the initial seven categories, like our main keywords: ‘website design’, ‘Ecommerce Web Design‘, ‘social media’, ‘search engine optimisation’,etc… Blekko has plans to release more as time goes on, they are just starting with the biggest traffic sites More >