Archive for the ‘Bad Web Design / SEO advice’ Category

If you are running a Photography Business and dont have a website or you have a website that doesnt perform or clients cant purchase their photos / canvas prints directly from it then you probably would benefit from us giving your site a bit of our attention and giving you some good advice. Photography Websites are quite popular with photographers and as a company we have done a few photography websites and the type of photography website that is ‘in vogue’ is the ecommerce type where you can upload your photos which will automatically put them into your website that allows you to sell the photos. Take a look at these website that we build that contains the ecommerce function that is specifically built for photographers. Here are some examples of photography websites where we built the ecommerce function into it, this is something I think would benefit all photography businesses online.

http://www.roastphotography.co.uk/
http://www.pinkonwhitewalls.com/
http://www.ginasmithphotography.com/
http://www.duckmania.co.uk/
http://www.garrysandison.com/
http://www.essex-photography.co.uk/ (under construction estimate live date March 2012)

The photography ecommerce part of the website is shown here (but is in all the above sites) http://www.pinkonwhitewalls.com/photocart/ (click on any gallery without a padlock for access – the padlock ones require a password for entry)

The new ecommerce solution is very user friendly for the administrator and allows you to upload (three different ways) images and Galleries / allows you to change images / monitor sales / monitor clients and much more.

The important thing is to give our clients the website exactly as you desire and to make sure it’s ranked highly in the search engines and has potential to grow and be easy to update and use, if you decide to look into this more then you can come to the Delicious Webdesign office in Stanford-le-Hope in Thurrock, Essex then we can show you the admin side of the websites and give you a quick demo and talk through the benefits of our websites that are created specifically for photographers.

or at least thats the promise a client told me they had received recently via an email, the way that will best demonstrate how silly these claims are I will reproduce the email and the responses with my normal sarcastic but ‘real’ comments:

[SEO company] I noted that you have 2010 pages being looked at by Google (although plenty of those are a server error promoting pharmaceutical products)
What I am offering you is a 250,000+ page satellite site that will cover you for every area in the UK (there are 44,443 areas in the UK). We are the only company in the UK that can create these sites as the program we use took 12 months in the making. Below is an example of how the satellite sites works. [delicious webdesign - naive and silly claims and statements]

If you type into Google “ domestic free solar”  no 1 worldwide is [website link given, that they are claiming credit for] If you type into Google  “domestic free solar Followed by absolutely any area in England you can think of, you will find they are on the front page of Google for every search [delicious webdesign - yes we agree that website is number one ranked but the search term is next to useless and a one page site could rank for that search term within 1 month]
For example “domestic free solar London”
You can also do the same for “commercial turbines”
These are just examples of how satellite sites work

Basically we can do the same for you using phrases like [clients key search phrases]  and on every single page we would place a direct link to your Main site. Also you are guaranteed to be our only client for National coverage for anything to do with your profession. Below is a site we have utilised a back link campaign that we can create for any site out there that has already been created by another company. You will notice the site is found naturally on Google for all the phrases listed below. Phrases to be found for are [included a ranndom list of search phrases]

I actually have plenty of examples but it would probably be better if I just give you this link to our testimonials [link given]  They are all on the front page of Google (without paying for adwords)

Also please note that we are by no means a back alley company,The Directors of our company are an ex-Development Manager at Sky and also held the position as Head of Sky’s search engineering department.
My previous position was also Development Manager at Sky.Should you have any questions I shall be available between Mon-Fri 9am to 4pm.

[Website Client] Our last designer did say we were linked to all those companies and that someone  who Martin had dealt with on SEO had probably done this.  You would understand better than me the implications of this.  Also, he has made some proposals which we thought we would just send over to you as again you will be better able to understand this.  What do you think?

[Delicious Webdesign] Probably should expect more of these type emails as the website gets ranked higher and higher, they are basically from companies promising to promote your website, we have got some real horror stories about the ruthless side of these companies.  I could pull their claims apart and talk to you for hours about their silly claims, but just looking at the example search result that they claim number 1 ranking for as an example will hopefully demonstrate how useless this company is for you. The search term “domestic free solar” that they gave in the email currently has so few searches that Google (via their keyword tool) shows me that they have such a low number of searches for that term they dont record how many searches are made for it so its probably less than 50 per month meaning its very very uncompetitive. They are trying to scare you about the ‘pharmaceutical products’ and you have nothing to worry about, once the website build is complete you will get a full report that details your SEO status.

[Website Client - email to company mentioned in the email] Can you confirm that you have had work performed on your website by the following company as they are claiming they have worked on your site and helped it rank highly for a variety of terms. Really appreciate this if you can get back to us

[Company Reply] no we have never heard of them and will be emailing them to complain

Get Your Website On The First Page Of Google On A Budget

We would like to offer a website Health Check and Demo at no cost to you to show you in detail how Google is seeing your website, if it is optimised correctly and give you some insight on how to get on the first page of Google on a budget and increase your online sales & leads. The health check needs no involvement from you or any external web company as our software will analyse your site online.

For more information about receiving our website health check and demo give us an email or call

You will also get accessibility to a 10 page White Paper on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) during a recession and a very useful Video to help improve your website for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Lots of my clients are experiencing a lot of sales calls from ‘SEO’ companies attempting to part them from their money in return for promises of website success, take a look at one of the emails received today by one client that demonstrates

a) They are unable to grasp the fact that the client shouldn’t be targeting unrelated terms (by giving them 5 search terms that is not applicable to their website / business)
b) They cant spell ’tilers’
c) They are claiming to be able to rank a website for terms that dont appear on the website (very hard and pretty pointless)
d) They are using hard sales tactics (repeat calls, offering discounts)

email text
——————
Thanks for your time today.

The basics of what we discussed are below:

(1) Natural Indexing on Google (centre of the page NOT PAY PER CLICK)
(2) Your site would be indexed under 5 key phrases (see below)
(3) Takes around 8 weeks to achieve rankings.
(4) You could then ease off / or stop the Pay Per Click that you do at £60 plus vat per month
(5) Saving you over £464 per year

Key words:

(1) Electrician Essex
(2) Plasters Essex
(3) Carpenters Essex
(4) Plumbers Essex
(5) Tillers Essex

This would normally be £495 Plus vat

However I will discount it down to £300 plus vat as you are an existing customer.

We do all the work, you don’t have to do anything.

Call you Monday as agreed, hope you see the sense it doing Natural Indexing.
————–
Always ignore these annoying phone calls, do you really want to trust your precious website to someone that phones you up out of the blue?

Conversations from an Essex based Website design company to one of their clients regarding their website. This demonstrates a massive lack of knowledge by the website design company as they recommended the most complained about SEO company in the UK and as they have no SEO knowledge themselves they had no idea how their ‘personalised’ results were giving them a different view of the Google rankings to their client. If in doubt get lots of opinions and advice and don’t trust ‘friends’ with all your business website requirements unless you are sure of their abilities.

[essex business owner] I have just had this from an SEO expert – They still maintain we are slipping back in the search engine rankings. I must admit we don’t appear to be getting many web enquiries recently, and almost no enquiry forms recently. Can you advise.

[SEO Experts] Did you ever consider the site changes and / SEO offer we gave? I mention it as I was looking at rankings of [your primary search terms] for companies yesterday and noticed that you are still moving down or sideways along the rankings. In Google your ranking for your most competitive search term [search term] is now 8th (it was 4th about a year ago when we first benchmarked you.

We are confident in getting you increased rankings and perhaps even in the top 3 for 4-5 different search terms and as we have done a fair bit of preparation work on your website we are willing to reduce the cost of our 3 month SEO project for you with no monthly commitment afterwards, plus we will reduce the cost of text / webcopy and the blog by 10% if you decide you want to increase your rankings / visitor numbers and website standing / popularity then this is a good option for you.

[Essex based website design company] You did not pay me for any SEO work however I optimised for more than 5 phrases within the cost. 3 months SEO work at that cost is absolutely shocking and is more than what you paid to have the whole site designed and built. If you want to give something like SEO optimisation a whirl, pay a much bigger reputable company about £25 a month. The company I recommended to you appear top for most search phrases on the search engines regarding SEO. And as said before, this website design company is offering you top 3 (which you already appear in my neck of the woods) so where will that leave his other customers?

Your site is fully content managed so you can get a company on board and manage all of this yourself, I will then help if any technical issues arise. Please don’t use this other website design and SEO company.

If you don’t have a professional Facebook Business Page for your website / business then you are missing out on a free, quick marketing opportunity. Why use Facebook? well you have probably spent a lot of time / effort and money on your website and your websites promotion (SEO) to make it rank highly in Google / Bing and Yahoo. Facebooks gets a huge amount of traffic just like the search engines. With facebook you can with one ‘click’ or like to your page you can capture that potential customer and you can easily retain them. Along the way you can inform, educate and survey these potential customers.

Facebook offers massive potential for the business owner. Get all your customers to tell all their friends about your business. Increasingly people are using social sites to get recommendations from their friends when looking for products and services. Engage, survey and communicate daily with your customers and their friends.

The Facebook Wall is not enough. In fact Facebook recommend that you work with developers to create an app to encourage likes. Our applications do a lot more than that. Its not just a question of being online or on the internet, nowdays that simply isn’t enough. You need to rise above your competition online and we can help you do that.

Over the years, we have noticed a real need for consulting and assistance for most essex bases builders  websites. We are not talking about a site needing better graphics, a better layout, look and feel. We are talking about the hundreds, if not thousands of building industry websites we have seen that have very little or no HTML META Title Tag, Description Tag and Keyword Tags for search engine submission enabling top rankings on search engine results.

Having a nice looking website with a nice look and feel with quality content is great, but if you do not have proper HTML META Data your website becomes like a nice boat or a nice automobile without any petrol / gasoline. We have created a new SEO Consulting Service within Delicious Webdesign. We have many years of experience with SEO – Search Engine Optimisation.

One of the many tasks we do for your websites includes adding or improving the HTML META Title Tag, Description Tag, Keyword Tags for every page ensuring that the whole site is  optimised it for search engine submission, we optimise it for high rankings and will either email you a copy of your site for you to upload /  FTP to your server or for you to email it to your website manager and they upload for you. In addition, we can upload to your server if provided with your login / password to your server. Once this is complete, we will re-submit your website to all major search engines if it isnt already listed.

Delicious Webdesign SEO Consulting Service can help your rankings in all major search engines. This service is not primarily designed to update your website’s content and  information, but rather to position you high on search engines for the keywords you provide us. Having a website that is not setup for search engine submission & placement, is likely causing you hundreds and thousands of dollars loss in potential revenue. If we decide that your website needs more content to rank competitively we will inform you prior to commencement of the project.

We would like to offer a website Assessment and Demo at no cost to you to show you in detail how Google is seeing your website, if it is optimised correctly and give you some insight on how to get on the first page of Google on a budget and increase your online sales & leads. The assessment needs no involvement from you or any external web company as our software will analyse your site online.

Pointless spammy emails from ‘personal email’ addresses or companies that dont seem very well qualified to be making promises about how they can help another company in the same sector as them.

1 Hey guys: I saw your website online while searching for Google [delicious: surely you are not very good if you found us while searching for Google ] – I noticed that while your website looks “hot” ( you are a web design company!) Your online rankings were not strong as they could be. [delicious: our rankings are a hell of a lot better than yours, you are a brand new company and your website is amateur and rankings are terrible how can you offer ourselves anything?]

2 Hi, I am contacting you on behalf of [dodgy website eCommerce company] you might know us for our affordable entry level product Transact, or one of the white labelled shop in a box style products we have created for our partners but that is not all we do. Our full product range is utilized by companies ranging from home-run shops right up to tier-1 enterprises. Our high end products are fully customisable and feature a whole suite of e-commerce functionality. We invite you to join us as a member you can not only build your customer’s sites based on our highly functional platform, but will also be paid a monthly revenue share for every site your customers run with us.

We realise that no one platform is suitable for everyone needs but are confident that many of your clients could benefit by using out system. If you feel you might be interested in earning some extra revenue whilst providing top-end websites [delicious: erm no thanks, we provide top end e-commerce websites to our clients without paying for the privilege to a 3rd party company]

1 We need the site to be able to display lots of text as well as images as the optimised text is what is going to bring your site visitors (via higher rankings in Google et al)
2 Would want to give your PPC adverts a free healthcheck initially on commencement of any SEO / website project but to manage the campaigns would charge a management fee but would really want you to spend less and less on PPC as your ‘organic’ and ‘natural’ rankings take off and bring you more ‘free’ visitors over the period after we complete your site and relaunch it.
3 When we redesign your website we do it very thoroughly we give your website a complete overhaul to make it work for you, ultimately bringing in more enquiries / clients and money to you.
4 Testimonials are great for a website (good for SEO and good for website visitors) we always encourage you to get more testimonials from your clients and ensure the existing ones include client names / services and areas ensuring that new key search terms added (normally the clients location and services or treatments).
5 Before we begin a project we always need from the client
i new images (with a decision on how many galleries are required)
ii Confirmation of service or treatment names and to give them to us in their priority order.
iii More example website frameworks you love
iv Examples of new stock images
6 Things we do ‘as standard’ on all projects, our immediate action points
i review content – remove duplicate content
ii, identify the existing website content for services that is needed
iii, create new content
iv, create new pages for new content
v, optimise new pages and then optimise existing pages
vi, review your google local place listings
vii, review google adwords campaigns
viii, install google analytics giving monthly website stats reports to clients.

Owner and Founder of Delicious Webdesign, Essex’s favorite website design company
Im James from Delicious Webdesign. Personally I have been involved with Information Technology and the Internet for over 15 years before starting Delicious Webdesign. We have worked with lots and lots of Thurrock / Essex based businesses and consider local small / medium service related businesses in this area to be our niche and welcome the opportunity to work with other Thurrock Businesses, especially companies in Stanford-le-hope, Grays, Orsett, Horndon and Corringham – If you have Website or SEO (website optimisation / promotion) questions or problems then feel free to ask. We work from home offices in Stanford-le-hope, Corringham, Brentwood and Cambridge. I am based in Stanford-le-hope.