Cirencester Website Design

Search Engine Optimisation tips and advice

Search engine optimisation is not about doing one thing.  If it were that simple there would be no need for Winning Inch SEO services.  This section will provide useful “bite size” chunks of information that will help.  But before anything else search engine optimisation is not a quick fix so there is no one thing you should do over anything else.  You need to do them all!

But improvements can be gained fairly quickly and as a guide to what you find in these articles here are the key topics.

SEO Preparation – These are things you should do or consider before doing anything at all

On page SEO – This relates to things you should do to the pages of your website.

Server side SEO – These are applied to your entire website and are unseen by your visitor but are seen and applied by search engines and browsers.

Off site SEO – These are things that are needed to be done away from the website altogether and principally associated with social media and link building

Search engine optimisation requires a lot of time and effort.  Professional SEO’s will take 20 hours or more to optimise a single page for a single keywords.  Research by far takes the longest chunk of time.  If you plan to do this for yourself you will need to assign a number of hours per month as it will take you considerably longer.

So be patient we will be adding tips to this section on a ongoing basis so pick one at a time and see it through before moving to next.  You can ask questions by leaving a comment and we will do our best to answer them.  Or of course you can just use the Winning Inch SEO service.

Search engine optimisation basics

There are a number of factors (around 30) that impact your website’s position on search engines.  Given that there are 30 plus elements that must be considered it becomes obvious that search engine optimisation is not something that can achieved easily by everyone.

Professional SEO’s will take around 20 hours per page / keyword to do the job properly.  This is why SEO is often seen as expensive and why most people try (…most fail) to do it themselves.

In this series of articles I will do my best to explain the SEO process and offer free resources, where they exist, to help you along the way.

The big SEO picture

Keywords drive the Internet so finding the right keywords is by far the biggest and most important task.  If you are not familiar with keywords or need to know more read our Keywords article here.

Having established your keywords the next task is to make an initial attempt to optimise the relevant page of your website.  A good “free” tool is the SEOmoz Term Taget tool this will grade your page specifically for a given keyword.  It is pretty simple to use just add your URL and the keyword and it will then grade your page.  Make the recommended changes / additions until your page reaches grade A or A+.

Using the above you have the tools to find keywords and to optimise your “on-site” website pages.  The next stage is SEO positioning.

Google China threatened to pull out of the region earlier this week.  The reason was hacking into human rights activists Google  e-mail accounts.

It now appears that a security weakness in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was at the root of the problem.  Apparently a fix is now planned but until then you can overcome the weakness by setting your “security zone” to high.

The computer attacks exploiting this weakness was targeted at Google and 20 other companies.  For Google it sparked off threats of pulling out of China all together who are already compromised by being forced to censor search results.

Website maintenance and update services from Winning Inch.

Winning Inch is pleased to announce new Website maintenance and update services.  From January 2010 you can use Winning Inch as your virtual website team.

The service will provide for ad hoc updates to text / images to existing website pages for just £50.00 per hour.   For contract client’s (40 hours or more per month) this rate reduces to £12.00.

Updates can be sent via e-mail, cd-rom or usb sticks or transferred directly via our own “instant chat” facility.  This dedicated service means that you are directly linked to your virtual team at  Winning Inch anywhere you have an Internet connection.  Just connect, tell us what you want and will make it happen in under 24 hours.

Read more for full pricing…

Google page rank demise

many people have witnessed the shake up over page positions in search results. Top search result positions used to belong to the website who had the highest page rank. It is this reason that link strategies played such an important role in SEO. Well looks like those days are gone and good riddens to it.

Apart from building shady business finding clever ways to buy and sell links, relentless “link to me” requests and of course blog / forum and other social networking spamming. The page rank system prevented new businesses and entrepreneurs from gaining any value from the Internet. It can take years to build a solid page rank naturally which does not really support the needs of new and small businesses.

The “welcomed” shift to content relevancy to search keywords is like a breath of fresh air. Relevancy is focused on your website’s content and meeting the needs of people searching for the content you offer.

It is too early to tell of this is a permanent change in direction or part of the Google caffeine roll out short term. But it does support trends in social networking. Most sites like Twitter, facebook etc use either “nofollow” or redirect links to avoid passing on “link juice” that would build page rank. The reason they do this is stop link spamming diluting true content with rubbish.

Social networks are vitally important. But rather than simply being a popularity contest the emphasis should be on driving traffic to your website.

So have we seen the demise of Google page rank. I hope so as it levels the playing for those just starting out as well as established website’s. Isn’t that the reason the Internet became so popular?

Twitter seems to be struggling under the weight of it’s own success. Leaving millions of Twitterers frustrated.

Twitter’s over capacity not only prevents access to the site directly but the Twitter feeds as well. Leaving blank spaces in website’s that should contain recent tweets and links to relevant information.

We do not have any answers so this post is just sharing the frustration that everyone else is feeling! So a plea to Twitter “scale up to meet demand”… Thank you

SEO tips – Avoid hidden text

Using similar colours for backgrounds and text can lead to problems of hidden text. You should avoid the risk altogether by using colours high contrast. Black and white is the format that we have become most familiar with from books, newspapers etc. That is not to say that it is the only options but care should be taken to ensure that you content can be read by everyone.

From a search engine point of view. Hidden text used to be a way of stuffing a page with keywords / links that could not be seen by the viewer but could be read search engines. As a result search engines are highly tuned to specifically omit content where it finds or suspects that hidden text is present.

So if you want to use white with off white or grey on grey for design purposes make sure it is an image to avoid being penalised.

Winning Inch provide professional SEO services to Cirencester based companies.

Large and small companies need to expand into new markets in order to support a growth plan.  This poses a problem for most organisations who want to maintain a local presence as well achieve growth further afield.

Using the Internet is probably the simplest, most effective and affordable, way of segmenting your market with messaging that target both local and new markets.

SEO / Internet marketing is a really effective tool with a good return on investment.  Call Winning Inch your local SEO Cirencester company on 01285 711699.

Winning Inch Internet Marketing Cirencester

Your website should be a major part of your overall marketing strategy.  The Internet offers an unparalleled opportunity to reach multiple markets simultaneously at a fraction of the cost of any other form of advertising.

Taking advantage of the proactive nature of the Internet delivers a sustainable source of new prospective customers.  To be successful key messaging needs to distilled for each product or service offering you provide to take into account:

• Target market
• Competitive landscape
• Actionable keywords

Organic / natural  placement is the key to reducing cost of client acquisition.  Hence investing in your website is a very attractive and astute business decision.

Use pay per click (PPC) strategically.  PPC is used to obtain good search result placement on a pay per click basis.   This form of advertising has it’s place but is not a sustainable long term solution.

PPC,  used strategically, measures actual keyword effectiveness to test new markets or to establish a firm foundation for struggling website before investing in a full website optimisation project.

For example an initial PPC campaign may be created targeting 100 or more keywords.  Over the term of the campaign, minimum 4-12 weeks, it is possible to analyse traffic trends to establish productive keywords.

Key measurements

• Hit rate per keyword
• Bounce rate
• Page views and paths
• Conversion rate

Based on the key measurements the keyword list can be refined (reduced) to those that produce the best results.  Using the refined list we can then look at ways of making improvements to the conversion rate.  This achieved by using website optimiser to provide alternate versions of the landing page.  This exercise allows us to refine the messaging to convert more hits to action.

The results then lead to optimising your website key pages to perform for natural placement which replaces the need to use PPC once established.  The exercise can be repeated to open a different market by testing another set of keywords.

Winning Inch manages the entire process from keyword research, PPC campaigns and website optimisation.  We also advise our clients to engage in social networking.

Social networking will inevitably take at least an equal share of lead generation via the Internet over the next few years.  To make a prediction as to when is not possible as there is still a long way to go before a true giant emerges.  But if we look at YouTube and MySpace they are both examples of “launch pads” where notoriety can be gained from obscurity.  Twitter has a lot of potential a a referral provider but has yet to be proven with any concrete commercial evidence.

Of course there are many niche success stories i.e. Money saving expert which has become a consumer led giant for all things to do with financial products and advice.

Our “social networking” holding advice, on top of a well optimised website, is to establish your own blog (we use and recommend WordPress) integrated to Twitter.  This combination provides Twitter coverage which is automatically generated by adding a blog.  This then comes together in your website by using the Twitter widget providing a dynamic feed to your website.  Hence you have tripled your exposure via your website, blog and Twitter.

Flash SEO | Optimisation

“Is it possible to optimise  Flash for search engines” This is a question we get regularly and the plain and simple answer is no.

Search engines have no way of reading a compiled Flash SWF.  Despite Google’s announcing it had got “better at reading Flash” in reality we have no evidence of this at all.

There are however techniques to overcome this i.e. using CSS to offset text off the viewable page so it cannot be seen by your visitor but can be read by search engines.  This currently does not cause “hidden text” issues as the search engine has no idea that the content cannot be read.  But from an elegance point of view and for the extra work it involves it is not really an answer.

Flash is fine, I love it personally, but unless it is being used as a small component for 3d rendering or for advanced animation it has no role to play in commercial websites.

We have converted a lot of Flash requirements (whizzy stuff) for both new and existing websites into search engine friendly components.  We use JavaScript to create screen shows that uses standard HTML and CSS.

JavaScript validates to W3C standards which ensures it works across all platforms (including mobile) and browser technologies.  As we are using standard HTML and CSS driven by JavaScript search engines are able to index the content fully.

So if you have a Flash website or key components that need to be search engine friendly contact us and we will give you specific guidance.

Online marketing SEO manager from Winning Inch

we are pleased to announce our new Internet marketing seo management service.  Many companies have identified the need to focus attention on their website as part of their marketing activity.  Salaries for this role are increasing and now range from £25,000 to £75,000 to attract a full time person.  However, salary expectations are increasing.  This trend is normal, talented resource is scarce, the best people are realising their value and moving to higher paid jobs.

Currently demand is highest for e-commerce marketing skills.

Winning Inch has the answer you can hire a full or part time resource on a monthly contract basis.  You can choose the level required, at an affordable fixed rate, ranging from an online marketing specialist, search engine marketing manager or SEO director.

You can also choose the hours needed from Full time 9-5:30, Part-time 9:30 – 13:30 or flexi time on an hourly rate.

• PPC Campaign management
• Visitor trending / analytics
• Keyword research and optimisation
• Social networking
• SEO Copywriter
• Server side SEO
• Performance optimisation
• Viral marketing
• Affiliate marketing
• Compliance testing

There may be times when you need a full team to get you were you need to be in the shortest period of time reducing to regular maintenance cycle of a few hours per month.  Winning Inch gives you the flexibility to pay for what you need when you need it.

Our SEO’s have html and css skills and are capable of implementing changes directly.  Where advanced skills are required i.e. e-commerce and website development our SEO’s are supported by Winning Inch website design and development staff providing your business with total project control.

Call us on Cirencester (01285) 711699.  for more details.  We cover Cirencester and the surrounding area including Swindon, Cheltenham, Bristol and Oxford.

Thanks  but actually we need to be alerted to potential problems only – Proactive monitoring service or a one off  SEO Package to get me started

Should I pay for links to improve my Google page rank?

No!  Not at any time, nor should you be convinced to hire a link building expert.  It is a complete waste of money.

The problem with links and page rank is that it has gotten out of control.  The original idea was “if a bunch of people think a page is great they will link to it”  Assumption – if a lot of people do that it must be good content right?  No wrong!

Well maybe if you are an authoritative source then people may well ink to your content. But this would be for tax or legal advice or other specific topics that are not usually associated with buying or selling.

But in reality, if I own a burger bar in my local town are people really going to link to my menu..  “Wow visit this site they sell burgers!”  No I don’t think so.  So then what is point of  having a good page rank?

Page rank as a measure of value of your website does not work.  Google got smart and using your IP address knows where you live.  So now it can serve results based on where you are in the world / country.  Page rank is no longer required.  The shuffle in the systems has seen some huge shifts in the top spots of search results as Caffeine was rolled out.

Optimising your website does work.  The shift away from using page rank, to a far more sensible “relevancy” indexing algorithm, means that if somene is searching for a local burger bar your website now has far more chance of being found..  Without any page rank at all..

So optimise your website for what you do and where you do it.  Forget page rank, links are good if they increase visitors to your website, but there is no value in just a link for the sake of page rank.