Archive for October, 2010

Obviously not all your website traffic comes from the search engines, there are people coming to your site by clicking on your website name you have in your email signature, from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, specialist directories, direct to the site by simply typing the website name into the address bar, they can come from website adverts and banners and a variety of other places.

There follows a few stats from a random website’s statistics taken over a week period in October 2010.

Pages/Visit 1.41
Pages per Visit roughly translates as the average number of pages viewed on a visit to your site. Repeated views of a single page are counted. (more page views is normally better her)

Average time spent on Site 1 Minute 49 Seconds
Average time spent on Site is the average duration of a visit to your site. (longer is normally better here)

Website percentage (%) of new Visits 66.97%
Percent of new Visits is the percentage of visits by people who had never visited your site before. (Google can tell the IP address of each visit)

Bounce Rate 44.77%
Bounce Rate The percentage of single-page visits, in other words the visits to the site where the person left your site from the entrance page (normally lower is better – a bouce rate of under 30% is normally good and a bounce rate of over 80% is normally poor)

Full list of website traffic sources

Rank Source / Medium (Visits Pages/Visit)
1. google / organic 263 (1.40)
2. direct / (none) 71 (1.45)
3. idc-guide.com / referral 26 (1.65)
4. google / cpc* 19 (1.70)
5. dive-centers.net / referral 10 (1.50)
6. facebook.com / referral 6 (1.17)
7. tauchbasen.net / referral 6 (1.50)
8. yahoo / organic 5 (1.40)
9. bing / organic 3 (2.00)
10. search / organic 3 (1.00)
11. webdive.ru / referral 3 (1.33)
12. google.co.uk / referral 2 (1.50)
13. scuuuba.com / referral 2 (1.00)
14. search.sky.com / referral 2 (1.00)
15. stumbleupon.com/ refer 2 (1.50)
16. aol / organic 1 (1.00)
17. delicious-webdesign.com 1 (1.00)
18. dmoz.org / referral 1 (1.00)

*cpc is google adwords / pay per click advertising

Of course we love the biggest search engine that brings the most traffic to our website, there are stats and reports saying Google is between 75-90% of the UK search market but as you can see from an example site / search engine referrer table below sometimes its even more. The following stats were taken from an international website that has clients from all over the world during a one week period in October 2010.

Rank Source Visits
1. google 263
2. yahoo 5
3. bing 3
4. search 3
5. aol 1

Keywords

We dont pay too much attention to keyword density and certainly dont write webcopy to meet a percentage quota for certain search terms as we believe naturally written text is the best webcopy for a site, but there is a great feature in Google Webmaster tools whereby you can see the most popular search terms / keywords that the Googlebot found when crawling your site.
Its important to review these to ensure that they reflect the subject matter of your site. The sample below would be a good example of a Scuba Instructor Education Center.

The higher the percentage the more occurrences of that word there are in your site, variants show the different words that ‘count’ for the same core word, for example the variants encountered for course are ‘course’ and ‘courses’.

Position Keyword Significance
1. padi (2 variants) 100%
2. course (2 variants) 88%
3. instructor (2 variants) 81%
4. idc (2 variants) 69%
5. dive (4 variants) 66%
6. diver (2 variants) 52%
7. diving 34%
8. water (2 variants) 25%
9. scuba 25%
10. specialty (2 variants) 12%
11. eanx 10%
12. care 10%
13. schedule (2 variants) 10%
14. divemaster (2 variants) 9%
15. education (2 variants) 9%
16. continue (3 variants) 8%
17. package (2 variants) 8%
18. florida 7%

Content is king, and it always will be, you can have flashy looking websites with great user interfaces and professinoal looking images but a big factor that the search engines use to determine what you are ranked for and where you rank is the actual content or webcopy on your site. We find its rarely even on the mind of business owners that decide that they need a website and some clients focus purely on the look of the website, neglecting the most valuable part of their site, the actual content.

Content in any Online Marketing Campaign is one of the most crucial factors to make the campaign a success. However, we find that in most cases the content is not good enough either in terms of user perspective or in terms of search engines.

Its fair to say that not many website visitors read all your content but the search engines read every single character of it and use it to work out exactly what you are offering and then determine your place in the search engines for every single search term that is contained within your webcopy. The webcopy that clients actually read needs to be focused, unique, relevant, factually correct, have a high flesch reading index and be written naturally and be appropriate for its intended audience.

Allow us to offer you our Website Copywriting Services. We work hard to deliver a hassle free and time bound copywriting service to our clients so that they don’t have to wait forever for a content piece. We deliver your webcopy on time and presented to you for proof reading and acceptance before it goes onto your live website, find out more about our webcopy service.

Once we begin a website project a website name is chosen and we purchase it on behalf of our client immediately, this is allow the client to see the development of the website as the project progresses and to avoid someone else buying the domain. This is an industry normal process. The hosting period of that website begins from the moment the website / domain is purchased and the first years hosting is included in every website package we provide.

The second and subsequent anniversaries of the domain purchase date will be used for invoicing purposes to charge for website hosting, current costs of which can be found on our website charges page

Was asked recently for some of our best SEO positions for our websites, here are a list of our current most impressive positions for our client’s website in Google.co.uk (done on 19th October 2010)

wedding cars essex 1st
essex builder 1st
essex electrician 1st
roofers essex 1st
security systems essex 1st
essex alarms 1st
Colchester wedding dresses 2nd
Steam cleaning essex 1st

All our clients are in our portfolio pages

Other Impressive positions

PADI IDC 3rd and 4th
Wimbledon Accountants 2nd

Currently ourselves and our clients are receiving a huge amount of link request emails, this is due to the fiercely competitive nature of SEO and link building is a critical building block of every SEO project. Here is a recent conversation I had with a client

Client: Today we received link requests from 4 companies I normally ignore these requests, do you think they are a good idea?

Delicious: As a general rule you are right to ignore them, links on other sites to your own are very good for your sites SEO but the links they will be offering are normally very poor (in terms of the ‘Google’ power and age of the page and the amount of other links on them)

Looking further at your specific email requests the company requesting a link on your site are offering you a link on one of their ‘link pages’ that already contains hundreds of links to other companies on very low value pages, so its almost worthless and your link to them would be worth much more to them that their link would be to you.

As you know we encourage you to get ‘related’ reciprocal link and have put some on your site as part of your SEO project, we will continue to do this at the rate of 1 new link per month over the next months with your permission and will ensure the link values are equal. Links are an important part of SEO but being associated with link farms / spammy sites is less than good

In general having a new website is an easy and quick way to increasing your profit margins, most service related companies are now almost expected to be on the Internet and you can get started by talking to us and then we can begin your web development project.

Delicious Webdesign is a leading Essex web development and SEO company and we believe we can help you save money and make larger profit margins. Even though business is business, we like to have some fun along the way and hopefully we’ll inject some fun and passion into the website projects we may do with you!

We are a team of young, creative and enthusiastic designers and coders who have a real passion in delivering high quality work time and time again.
We pride ourselves on continually producing flawless work to maintain long lasting relationship with our clients.

We have a client base stretching from America to Thailand and primarily work with small to medium sized service related companies. We can take on any website development work you may have; whether it be graphic design or raw coding we can do it, which will leave you to focus on other projects or other areas of your company. We enjoy working with our clients and we will gladly put you in touch with any of our existing clients for testimonials or references.

We’ve had over one hundred and twenty companies switch to us as their website design company / agency.

Our prices are very competitive and we guarantee our work is one of the fastest around without sacrificing quality.

We here at Delicious Webdesign we work on the main principle that there is no budget too big or too small and all our work is undertaken with the same calibre of expertise. All our designers and web developers are hand picked and we know that every single one is unique in their area of expertise.

You’ll have intelligent and elegant solutions to your projects that you simply won’t find with other companies. We have a portfolio available for all to see on the website of our current and past work.

We really believe we can reduce your costs and increase your profit margins by building a new website or promoting your existing one. We’ve already companies making significant savings by working with us due to the very fast ROI. They are getting their work completed faster and to a higher quality than they would have been able to produce without us! We look forward to hearing back from you and hopefully potentially establishing a great long term working relationship.

Photos and images are great for website, the help the viewer understand the product / service and they give you the opportunity to have your products indexed in Google images. An ongoing problem is when and how clients supply images, so here are our guidelines:

1, If the images is a photograph then supply them in jpg format (standard format for photo images)
2, Graphics or images with a small number of blocks of colours can be supplied in gif format.
3, Image titles should be in lower case without any spaces or punctuation (apart from hyphens) so no apostrophes.
4, The image extension should be in lower case (.jpg not .JPG)
5, Ideally the image size is reduced before sending it to us, ideally an image is no larger than 200kb each
6, Its better for the site in terms of making it easy for the search engines to know what your image is about, if you have descriptive titles for the photos / images.
7, Supply the images to us via dropbox /  email / memory stick or burn them on to a disk and bring / send them to us.

Image naming

All the images that get put on your website need to be in  lower case and have no gaps in the title, hyphens should be used instead of underscores so:

Wedding  Dresses_ 44.JPG should be

wedding-dresses-44.jpg (this is better for SEO and website code compliance

We have had clients send images by phone message and have resized, renamed and added these to their gallery the same day but it makes life easier for everyone to try to stick to the rules (or guidelines) above, but if your a client of ours you know we are flexible and wont mind how we get your images as we have the tools and know how to get them onto your website in the most efficient way.

It has now been more than 6 months since the last Google Pagerank update, this is breaking with tradition that saw the visible toolbar Pagerank updated every 3 months. The question on everybody’s mind is ‘why change’, one possibility is that Google is clamping down on link exchanges based on the visible toolbar pagerank of webpages. Whatever the reason, knowing Google, it has changed its update cycle to benefit the majority of people to ensure that website rankings remain as fair as possible.