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Everyone is an expert at Search Engine Optimisation

Today i've received another email from a well meaning person who has had a good look at a client's website and has sent me a really long email full of observations and tips that I could use to improve the website in question.

My first reaction run along the lines of ****** *****! then i remembered that a person's ego can often times be their biggest stumbling block and greatest impediment to success, so putting my initial reaction behind me, a read the email a second time. The email was really well put together and contained useful ideas and observations some were wide of the mark, others were interesting.

As web designers we almost never ask for feedback from people other than the client. There are many reasons for this, the simplest is of course that you can't please everyone and if you ask twenty different people their opinions you will get twenty different opinions. If you try and work those twenty different opinions into a web site design or your search engine optimisation strategy you will wind up with a web site that pleases no one and ultimately fails to do it's job. You can die of having too many doctors, your site can die from having too many directives.

Setting up a sucessful seo strategy is a bit like taking a bow and firing an arrow to it's target. It's good if you can clearly see the target in question and it's even better if you can get expert advice from people that have fired the bow before and have a sucessful history of hitting not just that target but many different targets at different ranges and sizes.

Taking advice from a client's customer might at first seem like a silly thing to do, but it can help occasionally if someone is already at the target web site in question and can shout some directions to you. This is where customer feedback comes in. Returning to the list, not all of the suggestions are going in, but the ones that are most congruent with the site's goal definately are.

At Nice Site Solutions we spend the bulk of our time learning new things, coding developments, web site design developments, new tips and tricks for search engine optimsation or the latest developments and changes from the big names like Google and Yahoo, understanding these new things and adding them to the vast bank of existing knowledge for integration is time consuming and hard work. Applying this mix of knowledge to a new site strategy is even harder, to make it work we have to have visible and attainable goals. Does this make us experts? The short answer is no? We are increasingly expert which is all anyone can be in this ever changing field. Hence my initial reaction when I got the email. The person in question does none of the above and doesnt work in web design or development or even on page site optimisation or search engine optimisation, not even internet marketing. All of the above I spent years learning. So you can forgive my initial thoughts on getting the email. Like I say I reconsidered it, because in one important way the customer is an expert, they are an expert at using the site in question, which is why the feedback becomes important. Best advice for anyone in a similar position is to solicit opinions, not just any opinions though, but the opinions of those close or at the target and the opinions of those that have fired the arrow before you. With all that expert help you wont go wrong!

Off Page Search Engine Optimisation

We’ve gone over the onpage seo web design and optimization, so let’s move on to the offpage search engine marketing and SEO which is what really makes a difference in your site’s ranking. Off Page Optimization is done outside the website in order to increase its performance in search engines for the desired keywords.

• Which web sites point to you
• The number of websites linking to you
• The Google page rank of the website linking to you
• The page title of the web site pointing to you
• The anchor text used in the URL pointing to you
• The number and type of links linking to the website that’s linking to you.
• The number of external links on the web site that is pointing to you
• The total number of links on the website that is linking to you
• Whether or not the websites linking to you are deemed by Google as an authority website.

The major offpage SEO techniques are as follows:

Link Campaign: One of the important parts of search engine optimization is building of links with the partners. Link building increases link popularity which in turn increases the google page rank of the particular webpage. Link exchange is one of the critical method of the web site Off Page SEO.
Social networking: Social network service refers to the several online social communities where the members share the similar interests and activities. Examples of such web sites are Facebook and My Space.
Directory Listings: Submission of the website to the directories will definitely enhance the generation of the traffic and link popularity of the particular website. Directories include list of websites that are meticulously checked. The directories are differentiated into several relevant topic categories which give information to the customers. Web directories are human edited and are much smaller than the search engine database.
Article Distribution: Article distribution is the modern trend of off-page optimization. An article with relevant keyword is written and the uniform resource locator of the self-owned website is placed at the end of article. Thus when the article is submitted in the popular article websites the traffic is generated to the self-owned website. Within less time, the website owner will receive potential buyers in the effective manner.

While doing off page optimization one should research and come up with multiple Anchor Texts containing the recommended density of keywords/keyword phrases. If you are not familiar with the word “Anchor Text”, it is the hyper linked text that is put on the Webpage which links back to your webpage.

Improvement in SERP or Search Engine Ranking Positions: It is the list of the web pages which a search engine returns according to the keyword query. The results generally incorporate the web pages with link to the page, titles, a brief description showing where the keywords have similar content in the webpage.

The Internet belongs to the person with the most money!

At CPTsolutions.biz and Nice-Site.org we love our customers and like most progressive web design houses we are always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to help our customers. There's only so much we can do however, you would be amazed at how many customers actually want us to run their businesses for them.

Yes people look to the web as a way of earning more cash, and of course we advise on web marketing, but you would be amazed at how these conversations spill into conventional non web marketing, then we find that our advice is sought.

A few years back one of our clients was told by their accountant that they needed to earn an extra £700 per week in profit to stay in business. You can bet that the very next phone call was one of 'we need the website to earn us an extra £700 per week'.

'Ok,' we said, 'What's your marketing budget?'

There lies the rub, the market budget was exactly zero, they didn't even want to pay us for tinkering with their site.

We tried to help and give good free advice, but the company management didn't want to hear. The manager just wanted us to ramp up the website so they could earn an extra £700 a week without it costing them anything.

I'm sure you will agree that this just cant be done. The internet is no different to any other part of the physical universe you cant get a result without expending energy. In other words no work, no reward. Nothing can be acheived without work. You can work smart or you can work hard or use some endless combination of the two. The keyword however is work, and work requires time which has to be paid for, hence the need for a marketing budget.

In other posts we will be looking at the type of thing you can do to get a good web position and lots of traffic running through your sites, using techniques that require minimal amounts of consistent work, after all we like hitting the beach just as much as anyone else and even though we are I.T. types we do like having a life. Watch this space...

The Reality Gap

The Reality Gap

As web professionals we often get asked for the weird and the wonderful. I'll give you a recent example of a customer conversation.

Them: 'We'd like a post code based database that can work out mileage between any location in the UK, then give a quote for the milage for our van and delivery service which can then take payment online.'

Us: 'Ok we should meet to discuss your exact requirements, from which we can work out a quotation for you and give you an estimate of how long the work will take.'

Them: 'Ok will you come to us or should we come to you?'

Us: 'We can do both, we've got an office in Llanelli...'

Them: 'Does that make you expensive?'

This conversation says a lot about the enquiries we're getting in this day and age. To be truthful, it's not the caller's fault it turns out that their budget was a couple of hundred quid whereas for a sophisticated system like that it should really be a couple of thousand at least. The reason behind this is that post code databases are expensive to buy from the post office/ Royal Mail and the custom coding takes time to put in place. The bulk of that time is of course taken up in testing. We have to make sites as hacker proof as possible and that is not an easy thing to do. Sorry we're not cheap.

Because people have seen cheap software on the web that's been developed professionally for and mass sold for low prices they are increasingly expecting us to provide them anything they want for miniscule amounts. They dont see that the mass produced software has been developed by a large company that may have spent hundreds of thousands of pounds/dollars to do so and is only profitable at low amounts becuase hundreds of thousands of people buy it, hence the reality gap.

As web designers the onus is on us to explain what is reasonable and what is feasible, sadly by then we've already lost the business, because it wasn't really there in the first place.

Web Design Wales and SEO Wales

For those of you who know nothing at all about PageRanks and Alexa rankings, I hope I can help

Alexa measures your website performance by volunteer users, in effect millions of average people agree to allow Alexa to collect statistics about their surfing habits and from that data, Alexa tracks and monitors activity on the Internet. Working with Alexa you can quickly see the traffic increases. For example one of our projects www.fotoworlduk.co.uk a supplier of Digital Camera and Camera Accessories showed an increase of 400% in just one month

Google on the other hand ranks your website by looking at who your website connects to and in return, who connects to your website. Whilst there's more to it than that, the basics of this explanation is correct. Google believes that if websites with high page ranks (the system is from 0 to 10) link to you consistently, your content must be of a certain value.

So now that you understand what a PageRank and Alexa ranking mean, how do you get a good page rank?

Sadly it's Hard Work!

I know that you’re all hoping for a much better answer than that but it is the truth. You can go from a page rank of 0 to 3 or 4 in just three month by regularly applying yourself to your website.

We recommend the following steps.

Register a good domain name that people can easily remember
host your site with business grade hosting so your site is always on the air.
Install a great design or content management system to build your online content.
Check the site is fully accessible for disabled or visually impaired users.
Ensure that all content is relevent to the site's over all theme or agenda.

When you've done that:-

Use deep linking techniques to ensure your potential customers know about your site.
Post links from your site to others asking the other site owners to do the same (make sure you source links from relevent sites)

Or you could ask us to take care of it all for you!

There are no scams, short cuts or breaking any rules that might see you blacklisted. A high page rank will take time to build and be based on quality content submitted to the internet as a whole. If it's relevent, well built and effectively promoted then a good page rank is a dead cert, eventually.

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