Archive for April, 2010

The Internet / Website world we work in isn’t perfect, which is good otherwise everything would be vanilla but sometimes things we see regularly really get to us, so here is a start of, what will probably be a long list, all the things we would rather not see on a travels around the Internet.

1, Website design companies that have great looking sites but their client sites in their portfolio are not theirs or they are completely rubbish or they are no longer live.
2, Sites that have W3C Validation icons, claiming to be valid but when the site is checked the site is not using (X)html or CSS valid coding.
3, Autostart audio and video on sites, its too intrusive and often frightens me!
4, SEO Cowboys, had a few clients come to me after being mislead / ripped off over SEO work completed (or not) on their sites.
5, How our Internet connection seems to only go slow when we are demonstrating things to clients.
6, Splash pages on websites, this isnt 1997!
7, Full Flash websites, ok there are some exceptions but standard business brochure sites dont need the added expense / hassle and bad SEO that Flash brings to the party.
8, Flash image galleries, yes they look nice but much better to have a javascript one thats quick and easy to update and much better for SEO.
9, Website visitor counters, not only does it give your competitors an idea how many visitors you have it just looks silly and dated.
10, High ranking sites that are over 10 years old, dont offer what you want and havent been touched / updated in that time.
11, Those widgets that invite you to book mark the site you are on in all the various social media apps.
12, Sites where you dont know what they offer within a few seconds.
13, Dead links, its so easy to check a website to ensure the integrity of its internal and external links, the web is a fluid thing and people should remember that.
14, Spam email, these people are targeting the gullible and they are probably driving fast cars and living in mansions, how did we allow that to happen?
15, Passwords, cant wait for biometrics to really take off when you get your retina scanned once per session and you are then signed on automatically to all sites that subscribe.
16, Filling out forms, I know there are auto-complete functions and auto-fill forms but please ! how many times do you think I have typed delicious webdesign !
17, Webpages that say something like: ‘news coming soon’, ‘check back soon to see if we have updated the page’, much better to have a little info instead of none on a page.
18, pages without a favicon, takes 2 minutes to create one and ensures your site is easily found among all my open tabs.
19, Online forms that ask too much stuff! people just get bored and dont fill them in.
20, Flash but just on the intro, mmm no thanks.
21, Ultra-critical people on forums that critique others but when you look at their own sites they are shockingly bad.
22, Dodgy colours, not everyone has an eye for website colours that work but there are aids out there and perhaps you should ask a friend before launching your site.
23, Images, especially on ecommerce sites, that say ‘click to enlarge’ and it gives you exactly the same sized image.

Finding a lot of new clients and existing clients are wanting to increase their search engine rankings recently and requesting that we perform our SEO projects on them. We find that our ‘complete’ SEO project where we not only complete a thorough analysis / review and update of your website during the SEO project but we review all aspects of your site that may not directly affect your SEO but could adversely affect you in other ways and give options to fix / update them to the site owner during the review.

I sometimes describe our ‘holistic SEO’ approach as like hiring an external rendering company for your house but the rendering company, after a careful inspection of your house, tells you that there is some cracks in the structure that needs addressing before the render is applied, or they may tell you that your window frames are starting to perish and it may be cost effective to get them replaced before the rendering is applied.

I am attempting to state that we will not do a ‘cookie-cutter’ type approach to SEO, yes we have a framework that we work through. but we allow ourselves to look further into the site from its colour scheme to its navigation, site hierarchy, page sizes, W3C validations, browser compatibility etc etc to ensure we give our clients the type of service we would appreciate ourselves.

If you want your site fixed, updated, promoted or even just reviewed then we can do that and in doing it we will show you what we have done before for other websites and what we have achieved in terms of SEO improvements to rankings of other sites, after all anyone can talk SEO but how many can actually delivery and have a proven track record in SEO.

Due to the links we automatically create for the sites we create and promote our sites generally get quickly upgraded by Google in terms of their Toolbar Page Rank.
The 2nd Page rank update of 2010 happened this Easter weekend 2nd / 3rd April. There is a table below showing some of our sites that were affected, this time around we had none that were downgraded but quite a few that were upgraded.

If your site sees an increase in its Google Page rank then this is generally a positive thing and means that you have meaningful / powerful links going to your site.

Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each webpage on the Internet; this PageRank denotes a site’s importance in the eyes of Google.