01 May 2008
Flash Website Search Optimisation
The David Payne Drama website is a nice looking site for a theatre company including animations and video clips.
My job was to optimise it for search engines.... "How do you optimise a Flash web site for search engines?" I hear you cry.
Well amongst some other special magic I performed on the site, I also added a link that says "Can't See Anything?" in the site's footer. That little link leads to the slightly boring but terribly accessible David Payne Drama HTML site, which is good for Search Engines and good for business.
Happy days!
The Web Consultant
My job was to optimise it for search engines.... "How do you optimise a Flash web site for search engines?" I hear you cry.
Well amongst some other special magic I performed on the site, I also added a link that says "Can't See Anything?" in the site's footer. That little link leads to the slightly boring but terribly accessible David Payne Drama HTML site, which is good for Search Engines and good for business.
Happy days!
The Web Consultant
Labels: better search engine rankings, Portfolio
28 April 2008
Hardcore WiFi
20 April 2008
Effective Google AdWords Campaign
This painted kitchen designer and manufacturer uses the web consultancy's search marketing services as the only form of advertising for his business. He receieves approximately an enquiry per day for his high end kitchens. The site was optimised for search engines in terms of build and we also wrote the search engine friendly copy too.
Labels: better search engine rankings, Portfolio
Optimising For Google and AdWords
This Bristol based solicitor Personal Injury Solutions wanted to appear highly in the natural and paid search results on Google.
By employing best practice search marketing techniques, adjusting his site slightly and completely reviewing his Google AdWords, We've managed to increase the amount of traffic to his site by 100's of percent for no additional cost with Google Adwords. Plus he's featuring really highly for the search terms CRPS Compensation.
I feel pretty darned good about that and so does the client.
By employing best practice search marketing techniques, adjusting his site slightly and completely reviewing his Google AdWords, We've managed to increase the amount of traffic to his site by 100's of percent for no additional cost with Google Adwords. Plus he's featuring really highly for the search terms CRPS Compensation.
I feel pretty darned good about that and so does the client.
Labels: better search engine rankings, Portfolio
13 February 2008
Geeky but good
OK - so I think we've established I'm a bit of a geek. I like sitting in front of my PC, testing websites on different operating systems, browsers and with different add-ons enabled.
I enjoy figuring out how to make my clients' websites appear above their competitors in search engines.
If my girlfriend stays away for a night or two, I leap at the chance of eating food that is high in MSG and low in nutrients. It also gives me the opportunity to avoid washing.
So, I am a geek.
But, I am not as geeky as the chap who writes this webcomic: http://xkcd.com/198/ and I kind of wish I was.
I enjoy figuring out how to make my clients' websites appear above their competitors in search engines.
If my girlfriend stays away for a night or two, I leap at the chance of eating food that is high in MSG and low in nutrients. It also gives me the opportunity to avoid washing.
So, I am a geek.
But, I am not as geeky as the chap who writes this webcomic: http://xkcd.com/198/ and I kind of wish I was.
Labels: Funnies
10 February 2008
What are meta tags?
This is a follow on from the post Does a blog make a good business website? I guess the other question we need to ask in addition to what are meta tags? is... how can they benefit my business?
Meta tags are the bits of a web page that you don't ordinarily see, but they are there hiding at the top of all web pages. Here's what a meta tag looks like:
The main meta tags you should concentrate on when you are considering launching your new website are:
Title (not a meta tag, but now is a good time to take a look at it)
Description
Robots
Keywords
The title appears in the blue bar at the top of your browser:
And along with the description, the title also appears in the search engine results:
So it's a good idea to have the search terms you'd like your page to be found for in both the title and the description.... There are no hard and fast rules governing what you can put in the title, but it's best to keep it simple and under 20 words. For the description, I try to keep to under 35 words. Different search engines will show different amounts of the title and description in their results pages so, make sure all your important information is in the first few words.
If your site is listed in the Open Directory Project or ODP (a human edited search engine, and your isn't listed yet, submit it NOW!) then Google, MSN & Yahoo! will not show your description in the search results but the description that ODP has written for you. You can override this with the robots tag. "Robots" is a catch all term for the automated browsers (or "search engine spiders", "crawlers") which follow all the links on the web to build up the index of web pages for their parent search engine.
Finally we come to the meta tag "keywords" - way back in the 1990's when the web was young, and search engines weren't as rich, rather than waste expensive resources on sending out their robots to read an entire page, the robots would read just the meta tags (including the keywords) for a kind of synopsis. The page would then be ranked according to the title and description and because there wasn't much info in here you could tell the robots what else existed on the page by giving it a list of "keywords". For this page the keywords might read something like:
Sadly, some people would stuff their keywords with hundreds of words hoping it would improve their ranking and even worse, some other naughty people used misleading keywords so that unsuspecting surfers might search for "spice girls" and arrive at a page showing pictures of ladies with no tops on. This wouldn't do, so search engines pretty much ignore keywords now and look at the title, description and actual 'on page' content to see what the page is about. I still use the keywords attribute myself, but keep it to 4 or 5 words per page. I'm not sure it has any real value, but if the keywords are accurate and brief, I'm confident it doesn't do any harm.
There are a few of final comments:
Keep your titles and descriptions meaningful and accurate, search engines like providing their users with accurate results. You will not achieve high rankings in the search engines if you over egg the pudding.
I know it's difficult but try to make sure you have a unique title and description for every page, to reflect the content on the page. This way all your pages are more likely to rank highly in the search results and you are more likely to be found by people who are looking for your products and/or services and who have never heard of you.
Need more help? Confused about this? Post a comment or contact the web consultant
Meta tags are the bits of a web page that you don't ordinarily see, but they are there hiding at the top of all web pages. Here's what a meta tag looks like:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html">This one would tell your browser to render the page as text. But that is soooooo tedious and nobody cares. So lets get to the useful stuff.... what you can do with your meta tags to make them improve your site's visibility in the search engines results pages.
The main meta tags you should concentrate on when you are considering launching your new website are:
Title (not a meta tag, but now is a good time to take a look at it)
Description
Robots
Keywords
The title appears in the blue bar at the top of your browser:
And along with the description, the title also appears in the search engine results:
So it's a good idea to have the search terms you'd like your page to be found for in both the title and the description.... There are no hard and fast rules governing what you can put in the title, but it's best to keep it simple and under 20 words. For the description, I try to keep to under 35 words. Different search engines will show different amounts of the title and description in their results pages so, make sure all your important information is in the first few words.
If your site is listed in the Open Directory Project or ODP (a human edited search engine, and your isn't listed yet, submit it NOW!) then Google, MSN & Yahoo! will not show your description in the search results but the description that ODP has written for you. You can override this with the robots tag. "Robots" is a catch all term for the automated browsers (or "search engine spiders", "crawlers") which follow all the links on the web to build up the index of web pages for their parent search engine.
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOODP">tells the search engines to show your descriptions, not those which ODP has written on your behalf. You can also give the commands "NOFOLLOW" (tell robots not to follow links on this page) and "NOARCHIVE" (tells robots not to include this page in the index), but really this should be done in a separate file called robots.txt, which all robots look for to get instructions when they arrive at a website.
Finally we come to the meta tag "keywords" - way back in the 1990's when the web was young, and search engines weren't as rich, rather than waste expensive resources on sending out their robots to read an entire page, the robots would read just the meta tags (including the keywords) for a kind of synopsis. The page would then be ranked according to the title and description and because there wasn't much info in here you could tell the robots what else existed on the page by giving it a list of "keywords". For this page the keywords might read something like:
<meta name="KEYWORDS" content="search marketing tips business uk">
Sadly, some people would stuff their keywords with hundreds of words hoping it would improve their ranking and even worse, some other naughty people used misleading keywords so that unsuspecting surfers might search for "spice girls" and arrive at a page showing pictures of ladies with no tops on. This wouldn't do, so search engines pretty much ignore keywords now and look at the title, description and actual 'on page' content to see what the page is about. I still use the keywords attribute myself, but keep it to 4 or 5 words per page. I'm not sure it has any real value, but if the keywords are accurate and brief, I'm confident it doesn't do any harm.
There are a few of final comments:
Keep your titles and descriptions meaningful and accurate, search engines like providing their users with accurate results. You will not achieve high rankings in the search engines if you over egg the pudding.
I know it's difficult but try to make sure you have a unique title and description for every page, to reflect the content on the page. This way all your pages are more likely to rank highly in the search results and you are more likely to be found by people who are looking for your products and/or services and who have never heard of you.
Need more help? Confused about this? Post a comment or contact the web consultant
Labels: better search engine rankings
08 February 2008
Friday night is research night
Wow, my life is so rich and full. All of my meetings overran this week and consequently I'm only just getting the work that I should have finished on Wednesday done now. And it's Friday night.
Never mind, in a little while I'll settle down with a nice Rioja and read this really useful article.
Sometimes, I agree with people when they call me a geek. Other times I just weep into my keyboard. No wonder my girlfriend has started to work increasingly late increasingly often....
Never mind, in a little while I'll settle down with a nice Rioja and read this really useful article.
Sometimes, I agree with people when they call me a geek. Other times I just weep into my keyboard. No wonder my girlfriend has started to work increasingly late increasingly often....
Labels: rants
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