Cirencester Website Design

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?

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.

Website GEO Targeting same language getting it right

Scenario I want to target both the UK and US markets from the same website.  The issues are:

1. How do I target two markets from one website
2. How do I avoid being penalised for duplicate content

The options seem, at first, to host a .co.uk in the UK and a .com in the US.  This will work provided you have unique content for each website.  This causes problems of maintaining two website’s with twice the workload.  So in the long term managing two website’s becomes messy and expensive.

The right way to do this is to consolidate everything into one website.  Using a non geographic TLD such as .com or .org you can create country versions.  I.e. mywebsite.com/uk/ or mywebsite.com/usa/.  Using Google webmaster tools you can use their geo targeting option to specify where you want to target specific url’s.  You may decide to make mywebsite.com, main site, to target the USA and then use mywebsite.com/uk/ to target the UK.  You add both URL’s to Google webmaster tools and specify the target for each.

Pretty simple really.

So maintaining the website and avoid duplicated content.  You MUST localise key pages such as the home page and any other important pages.  But for universal pages you can duplicate the content to reduce administration.  But you must add link rel=”canonical” tag to those pages so that Google understands what you are doing. More info..

Search engine optimisation package

The complete SEO package for £999.00 saving £295.00 if purchased separately.  The package is professionally managed by our own experienced SEO’s.  Included:

• Keyword research
• Competitor analysis
• Keyword effectiveness testing
• Website performance
• Server side SEO
• Social networking with integrated blog and Twitter

Keyword research

We research the right keywords for your website, goods and services.  The report includes keyword list, Keyword effectiveness Index, total search volume and anticipated market share and conversion rate based on keyword difficulty.

Competitor Analysis

We compare your website versus the current top 10 competitors (page one results) for the primary keyword established in the keyword research detailed above.  See sample report.

Keyword effectiveness testing

Before committing to a keyword/s we test each one for actual effectiveness.  Using Google Adwords we create a campaign and measure the performance of each keyword.  Using analytics we will establish the right keywords and content requirements.  Of course once we are done with the testing you are able to continue or create new PPC campaigns either via Winning Inch or for yourself.

Website performance

Load speed is beginning to play an important role in search result placement.  Optimising your on-site performance will reduce load speed time making your website more competitive in the market place.  This new requirement is in response to “slower” mobile device network speeds and is a fundamental part of Google’s caffeine roll out.

Compliance to W3C standards is an increasingly important aspect as we move into the “Mobile Internet” age.  Validating your website will ensure that it is viewed, as designed, regardless of technology old and new.  It is your assurance that potential new clients are getting the right impression of your company.  The alternative is to risk increasing bounce rate which will inevitably lead to poor search result placement for your website.

Server Side SEO

This resolves duplicate content issues caused by canonicalisation issues (see post) we create and load a small script that will remove any risk of being caught out.  In addition we also ensure that we adopt the most efficient configuration of your hosting by setting file compression to “on”.  This speeds the transfer process from server to browser.  Plus we adjust browser cache settings so that minimal effort is required by the users browser to reload your page in future visits.  This dramatically improves over-all performance.

Social networking

We ensure that you start your social networking optimisation by providing a blog hosted on your domain.  The blog platform is Wordpress for which we provide a custom template to match your existing website.  We then automatically integrate this with Twitter so that each post you make automatically updates Twitter.  Finally we integrate a Twitter widget into your home page which then displays all your blog posts.  In doing this we triple your exposure.

Proactive monitoring

We generate and submit a sitemap to Google on a monthly basis.  We also monitor your website using Google Analytics and Webmaster tools.  The first month is included and ongoing monitoring is available at £99.00 per month.

Everything described above is done by hand.  There is no automation, most of which would cause Google violations if it were, our professional SEO’s  will communicate with you directly and on hand as and when you have questions.  The entire service, apart from proactive monitoring month one, is included in the price saving you almost £300 is purchased separately.  For latest pricing visit our website design service page.

Winning Inch website CMS (Content management system)

Our CMS is independent which means that we can apply our CMS to any static website at any time.  This gives you the freedom to update your content as often and when you want.  All you need is Internet access from any computer and you can update your content.

To add a CMS to your website you provide us with your FTP details.  We need to add editable regions to your website and then give us the names of who you want to edit what areas of the website.  This can be the entire website, a certain page or even just a small region of a page.

The CMS is included in all our website design packages or separately for a one off fee of £50.oo for the first page and £20.00 per page thereafter.  After that the monthly fee is just £2.50 per month regardless of the number of pages.

To check the set up fee visit website design service page.