Cirencester Website Design

Cirencester Civil Engineering are well known for their civil engineering projects including the prestigious memorial for Princes Diana.

Lesser known is their domestic driveway service providing everything from gravel to their hall mark resin bonded surfacing.

Having researched the market our advice was to create a new website specifically targeted at the domestic market.

Covering the UK the research indicated that most Internet searches are done on a local basis i.e. “driveways gloucestershire”. From an SEO point of view this is not great as the traffic volumes are low individually but added together is significant.

The answer was to integrate a blog that would allow CCE to add references for the work they have done nationally.

Once indexed by search engines they will appear in local searches based on the blog content.

We automated Twitter so that every new blog past is sent to Twitter and we then integrated Twitter into the CCE Driveways website.

A simple SEO solution to a complex issue. The new website is monitored and tweaked by a Winning Inch Digital Marketing Manage on a fixed hours per month basis.

The website is fully editable by the client using the Winning Inch CMS system and the blog architecture is open source WordPress blogging platform fully customised to match the main website.

The Blog pro-actively “pings” search engines and other social networking sites automatically to maximise exposure.

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Personal wedding websites offers both a free wedding website with a customisation option.

The concept follows the growing popularity of sharing wedding plans with guests and family in the United States.

Building memories. Using the blog friends and family can add to the experience both before and after the wedding. Add photographs and videos both “official” and those uploaded by others.

Cost savings. With everything available on-line there is no need to create expensive stationary. Just provide your guests with the web address and they have all information about venues, maps, places to stay, wedding list etc all in one place.

The Wedding is just the start. As time goes by the website can reflect key events in your life together.

Secure or not. Your choice it can be completely open to tell the world or hidden from everyone, including search engines, and give your guests password access.

There are 5 ready to go free wedding templates to chose from all hosted at no costs and no annoying adverts either!

Alternatively a fully customised website design option exists. There are no limits so creating a truly unique website can be yours. You start straight away using a free template and the custom design is added as soon as it is ready. Your existing content is unaffected by the new design.

The client is so pleased with our work that we have an ongoing relationship building the custom websites for those who want this option.

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Christmas comes but once a year. Not true for the Christmas shop! They are open 7 days a week every day of the year.

Winning Inch was called in August 2009. The existing website was not performing at all with just 200 visits per month.

The bounce rate, the measure of content meeting expectations by visitors, was really bad at 92%. Meaning visitors opened the website and left again quickly.

Winning Inch redesigned the website, added a new e-commerce system and provided a Digital Marketing Manager on a three month contract.

The results speak for themselves. The bounce rate is now 30%, site visits peaked at 13,000 and even now, March 2010, is still at 8,000.

Main features of the new website:

Search engine friendly e-commerce

Optimised structure

E-mail sign up and CRM

Social networking integration

Keyword targeted

Search for:

“Christmas shop” page 1 position 1-2 on Google competing with 124million other websites.

“German Christmas decorations” page 1 position 1 on Google competing with 591,000 other websites.

The new website can accommodate new requirements such as “Easter” products easily and with a full CMS system content updates can be done by the client at any time.

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Pay Per Click (PPC) is not in itself a sustainable strategy and should therefore be used tactically.

Wining Inch SEO’s view PPC as a means to an end. It is a tool used to gauge the value of a set of keywords. Keyword research can only go so far in indicating traffic volumes and competition difficulty. Reality is very different. For example a given keyword i.e. “design” is very broad and although traffic stats may look good it will include a mass of benign visits. where as “designer” may have less volume but is far more likely to convert.

Obviously this is a simplified example to emphasise the point that someone searching for a “designer” is more likely to have a more immediate need over someone searching “design”. The moral being do not waste money on benign keywords and learn from the practical experience.

Using PPC to weed out unproductive keywords, those that do not convert, leaves productive keywords. Winning Inch SEO’s adopt the, proven, productive keywords into the client’s website and/or social media strategy.

We recommend using PPC tactically to optimise your website organically. Projects typically range from 1-3 months and spend is based on your budget. Call us on 01285 711699 for more information.

SEO Server optimisation is relatively quick and simple but can have a profound effect on your website performance in search placements.

The first consideration is the removal of any duplicate content risk. If you can access your website using http://yourwebsite.com as well as http://www.yourwebsite.com. The chances are that your website is not performing. The reason is search engines view the two possible variants as two entirely different websites. This is referred to as Canonical or canonicalisation. If you are familiar with your server’s .htaccess file you will find how to fix the problem in a couple of lines of code which you will find here..

However, those not familiar with your server environment Winning Inch will do it for you.  But there is more that needs to be done.

File compression.  Your server can be set to send compressed data to your local browser.  This significantly reduces the transaction time between the server and the local machine browser.  Since the introduction of Google Caffeine, December 2009, load speed is now an issue that will effect your search positions.  This is mainly due to the move away from PC’s and Lap top’s to more and more people using mobile devices.  Again as above this can be fixed using the .htaccess file.

Browser caching can also play a big role in performance.  By default it is unlikely that your server tells a local web browser to keep a cache of large files i.e. images.  So each time your website is loaded in a browser the server needs to send each image.  If browser caching is switched on, setting to cache the images for a month or more, the images are already available to repeat visitors.  The result is a super fast load time.

Google collects load speed from browsers using the Google bar so all aspect covered above are important now but more so in the next 12 months.

Another consideration, for dynamic website’s, i.e. e-commerce, is to make the server deliver search engine URL’s.  For example if you sell a range of clothes your product pages URL’s may look like:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/product/category.php?CategoryId=414367&ProductHead=24

When it should read:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/designer-name/mans/jumpers/blue/size34

The former is useless to a search engine whereas the latter will be highly effective in placing that item in search results.  This too can be corrected via the .htaccess file, however, it will depend on your existing architecture.

Winning Inch provides a full server side SEO package from just £99.00 which is a time exercise.  Call us on 01285 711699 for more details.

Our server side SEO package is also available from our complete SEO package.  You can save £295 on a complete SEO solution over buying individual items.

Social networking is an essential element to positioning your business via the Intenet.

A social networking strategy is very individual to what your business has to offer.  It is about two things the first is “authority” and the second is “engagement”

Authority

Maybe authority it too strong a word.  It should read “authoritative” in your business sector.  This is mainly gained via your own website content and blog.  A practical authoritative measure may be the number of people that link to your content.  This has long been established as Page Rank via back links.  This is a dying requirement in relation  to search search result placement and is giving way to relevancy.  Bing for example places far more emphasis on relevancy than the number links you have.  Google has recognised this and is, due to the grey industry built up around back links, moving toward relevancy and performance.

Engagement

However, there is authority to be gained via other methods.  Participation and even hosting an industry forum.  This connects directly to your potential customers.  We have seen this work very successfully at money saving expert where people go to find answers and ask advice on all kinds of financial matters.  Personal referrals really work.  For the younger market this is a given they ask for advice from their online friends and the popular votes wins.  This has not escaped the eyes of the search engines who are all involved / own leading social networking websites.

As a business you will be an expert in your chosen field.  So spread the word, demonstrate your expertise and although you cannot be too blatant about it sell your company.  Your participation and profile authority will not be missed by search engine’s.  Remember that “no follow” or link redirects can still be followed by search engines.

Creating your own forum is clearly a good thing to do.  It increases relevant traffic to your domain which builds trust and loyalty.  Within our business SEOmoz, they provide free and premium SEO tools, have a very active forum.  Members can post questions and receive answers from SEOmoz SEO’s and other SEO’s like Winning Inch.  Of course this not a great model as you need to pay to ask a question but never the less it is an effective marketing platform.

Google too has a very active webmaster forum.  This helps webmaster’s with problems to ask questions and receive answers.  Questions are primarily answered by more experienced SEO’s /Webmasters who give their time voluntarily.  Winning Inch SEO’s must participate in this forum and required to maintain a level 7 plus authority ranking.  This is the forum we use to build our own authority, is a great source of new business and maintains our knowledge base as changes in Google’s search algorithms can be identified early.

Hosting your own blog is another way to engage / extend your keyword base / exposure to a larger audience.  Winning Inch provides a blog customisation service so that your blog matches your website.  We recommend WordPress as it is very well supported, is mature and is packed with relevant helpful features such as pro-actively “pinging” search engines and social networking website every time you create a new post.

We add a Twitter feed, much like the “ping” service, your blog is tightly integrated with Twitter.  We also recommend adding a Twitter widget to your website home page.  This creates maximum exposure of blog both at a Twitter level and website.

The Winning Inch social networking service is available to identify the right social networking sites for your business.  Call us for more details on 01286 711699.

The other option is to engage one of our Digital marketing managers to manage the entire process, and much more, for you.

Winning Inch launched a new free SEO advice group on Facebook.

The new service will offer free SEO advice to website owners.  To use the service visit free seo advice and ask a question.

We look forward to seeing you there.

SEO tips – Page titles

Good page title tags are essential. We often find that title tags are neglected creating an “untitled page” or that the same page title is used for all pages.

Search engines use title tags to display page info in search results.

As such title tags are essential and must reflect the content of each page and use appropriate keywords.

Title tags go into your <head> section of the web page between <title></title>. i.e. <title>your page title goes here</title>

Title tags should be a short summary of the pages content and include your keyword.  When you see a list of results from a search engine the first line on each result is based on the title tag.

Title tag length should be limited to around 65 characters, including spaces, this is not a definite number but is the maximum that will be displayed so to get your message across concisely do it in 65 characters.

See also meta descripton

Cirencester Website Design

Cirencester website design delivers website and Internet services to the local business community.  We are opening a new office in Cripps Road, Cirencester which has great parking facilities “Brewery Car park”.  Locals will know this as the Tesco Metro car park.  We will be retaining our design and development office in Fairford.  We will be opening the new office in January and this move demonstrates our commitment to local businesses both large and small.

The new office will offer access to a broad range of services ranging from Website design / redesign, search engine optimisation, Internet marketing as well as print design and traditional marketing.

Competing in today’s market requires an integrated approach to marketing your business.  The benefits of working with Winning Inch is to reduce overall cost whist increasing effectiveness and of course to have a single point of responsibility.

We look forward to working with you and until then have a great Christmas.

SEO in 2010 is going to be new ball game in the first quarter and throughout the year.

Google will be rolling out Caffeine which is less revolution but more evolution.  The emphasis is on speed.  This makes sense when more and more people are using mobile devices to “surf the net”.  As such website performance is going to play a major roll in where your website appears in search results.

What does this mean for your business.  If you are currently established for productive keywords you may well lose position.  The effect on your business will depend on how you much you rely on Google to generate traffic /new  clients.  If search engine positioning is not important to you then you need to do nothing at all.  For everyone else it is already too late.  Caffeine roll out has already begun but which data centres will be updated when is anyone’s guess.

The need for action is between now and April 2010.  This initial period is likely to be fairly lenient with settings hotting up throughout the remainder of 2010.

Specifically your website needs to meet a target load performance level of less than one second.  Google’s own pages load speed are circa 0.6 seconds.  But then their own pages are very basic as they are more utilitarian than a commercial website.

We took our existing website  http://www.services-web-design.co.uk , which is slow at around 2.8 seconds,  as the basis to create our new website http://www.cirencester-website-design.co.uk.  In this process we reduced load time from the original site of  2.8 seconds down to just to 0.56.

How did we do it?

Firstly we created clean code for the website which validates to w3c standards.  This was the starting point.  We minimised the CSS and JavaScript code by stripping out all extraneous code and white space.  We minimized images and used CSS backgrounds to fill in the blanks.  We consolidated our script’s into a single file.  Off site we enabled Apache gzip to compress the files further and finally we used server side caching to extend the cache period of larger files.  In all we improved performance by 500%.

The biggest savings came from clean code and removing redundancy.  As website become older things get changed.  This often leaves pieces of code that are no longer in use but are still being read / interpreted by a web browser creating unnecessary  baggage reducing performance.

Of course up until now performance has not really mattered.  But now it does it needs to be addressed.  Both website’s mentioned above are available to view.  Our decision to rewrite the website rather than edit the old  was a concious one.  For us it was / is partly an experiment but commercially it was quicker and cheaper to recreate rather than a trial and error approach i.e. figure out what we would break if we took something away etc.

Other website ranking issues that Google Caffeine may introduce are as yet unknown.  So watch this space for more details.  We are keeping a very close our client websites metering changes and looking for commonality to identify trends.