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

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.

Received by clients more false promises and of course our sarcastic comments

Most of the old ways of getting new customers are dead. 87% of people now search online before making a purchase [delicious: read recently it was 67% researched online before making a purchase] or before they come into your place of business to make that purchase.

There are 880 people searching on the Internet for your business in a month. How many of them are finding you online and spending money with you? [delicious: I salute your inside knowledge of my business, you must have our website stats for that and even if you did to claim you know the amount of people searching specifically for our business is a bit strange, more correctly you maybe able to predict the amount of people searching a specific phrase but specific business is a bit irrelevant]

For less than the price of a local leaflet drop you could be getting in front of these buyers, [delicious: but surely we are already 'infront' of them simply because we have a website and its indexed in the search engines] so email me now to discuss how you could get more customers today. I’m not asking for you to call at this stage, as we get inundated with calls [delicious: yeah of course you do] and prefer phone or face to face appointments. Reply to this email now and we’ll schedule a quick chat.

I phoned you a short time ago on the topic of Effective search engine optimization with regards to your online site. [delicious: no you didnt] Is it possible we could arrange a SEO placement discussion through e-mail at all with one of our consultants? If you’re not dealing with the Web optimization for your online business internet site might you please forward to the someone who does at all? You could also send an email direct if there is inquiries you wish me to answer direct on the phone or can get in touch via our internet site also. [delicious: you are so generous ! but I think I will give this a miss]

Therefore allow our team the opportunity to review your business website and Search requirements and then offer you a quote based on our knowledge of your desires [delicious: we are not language experts but suspect that last sentence originated in India somewhere]. Please provide us with an overview of what you are looking for in terms of your ‘website goals’ We will do our absolute best to work for you to help bring your website on the TOP of search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN.[delicious: to show you how long they have been sending out these emails and an indication of how cutting edge they are, MSN was replaced by Bing about 12 months ago now!]

Website Content or webcopy has always been the fundamental segment in search engine optimisation. Search Engines give importance to quality as well as unique content on websites. The uniqueness of content assists websites to get indexed with leading search engines. It also helps web users to find out relevant products/services.

Couple of tips regarding content:

Along with uniqueness of content, length of the content on a website matters too. One should try to explain web page information precisely.

Paragraph size should be kept short so that it’s easy to read and scroll. If content is lengthy, one can divide it into 2-3 pages which is a good technique.

Here is a new website optimisation / SEO service that we hadn’t seen before ‘Meta Tag Creation’. It seems some companies are offering to code the meta tags for your website and was interested enough to see what came back from one of these services, the following is the details received from such a company, accompanied by our thoughts

We are contacting you regarding your purchase of Meta Tag Creation for your web site

As agreed with your Account Manager we have compiled and included with this e-mail the completed Meta Data for you to upload to your site.

The completed tags to be uploaded to the specified pages are shown below. [We say: no pages are give] Prior to uploading these tags to your web site, it is recommended that copies of any existing pages are made. Should you use a Content Management System, or similar, it will be necessary to copy the title and meta tags from the attached pages before entering them into your site’s CMS. Instructions as to how this is achieved should be available within the documentation for your particular CMS.

However, as a goodwill gesture we are happy to upload the meta tags on your behalf. To do this we would require the FTP details to the web site, which should have been sent to you by your hosting provider, consisting of a “hostname”, “username” and “password”. Please note we can only upload the meta tags if we can gain access to your web site. If you wish for us to upload the Meta Tags, please send an e-mail  including the FTP details from your hosting provider. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact our Technical Team

Meta Tags
<title>[Company Name] – wedding dresses essex, bridesmaid dresses essex, wedding gowns essex, formal hire wedding suits essex, bridal wear essex</title>
We say: Cardinal Sin of the Title tag is wasting the first word with the company name, unless your a multinational ‘brand’ this is a waste of space, if you must have your company name put it at the end of the tag. Additionally they have included 120 characters where it should be 70 maximum. They have repeated the county 5 times which is simply spammy.

<meta name=”description” content=”[Company Name] offering wedding dresses essex, bridesmaid dresses essex, wedding gowns essex, formal hire wedding suits essex, bridal wear essex” />
We say: This comes in at 125 Characters where you should be aiming for 150, especially if this is a paid for service, additionally the Description is your chance to sell your company and this description is nothing more than a list of search term.

<meta name=”keywords” content=”[Company Name], wedding dresses essex, bridesmaid dresses essex, wedding gowns essex, formal hire wedding suits essex, bridal wear essex” />
We say: Even though keywords are next to useless, Google ignores them, the common search terms are included but again the county is repeated too many times and appears ‘spammy’.

<meta name=”copyright” content=”[Company Name]” /> 
We say: Not needed / no SEO benefit at all

<meta name=”author” content=”Optimised by [Another SEO Company Name]” />
We say: Not needed / no SEO benefit at all in this advert!

<meta http-equiv=”expires” content=”" />
We say: Not needed / no SEO benefit at all

<meta http-equiv=”charset” content=”ISO-8859-1″ />  
We say: W3C recommends Unicode encoding as UTF-8

<meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”English” />
We say: This is a .co.uk domain hosted in the UK for UK customers so pretty worthless

<meta http-equiv=”vw96.object type” content=”Document” />
We say: not recognised by the search engines and obsolete

<meta name=”rating” content=”General” />
We say: Not needed / no SEO benefit at all

<meta name=”robots” content=”index,follow” />
We say: These are the default statements and do not achieve anything

<meta name=”revist-after” content=”7 days” />
We say: The days of telling the googlebot what to do are gone

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html” /> 
We say: Can and should be combined with Charset like this <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=utf-8″ />

They supplied only one lot of meta tags and presumably expect you to load it on the index page, meta tag optimisation is an important part of our SEO projects and one that should be done carefully and with expert SEO knowledge. Judging by the meta tags created above you will need to be wary of companies offering this type of service. If you want your website optimised and promoted there is limited benefit in just updating the meta tags (especially if its done poorly like the example above). You need to attack SEO in a holistic way, meaning there are many factors to consider before simply updating meta tags.

The moral of the story in this SEO post is ‘look at the big picture’ SEO Gurus are not introverted, or this one isn’t anyway

Here are some more un-professional / amusing responses to clients inquiries when they have put questions to their previous website design company or seo company, these conversations below brought a smile to our face, but also are included to explain away some incorrect knowledge of how website design and SEO works). Some details of search terms and website names have been changed to stop any undue embarrassment.

Site Owner: Whats happening with our rankings now?
Web Company: Google seems to be reading the site well. You are second on Google for [search term 1] and [search term 2] above the [competitors] website. [our comment: 'reading the site well' mmm that's good to know:) At the time of writing the two search terms mentioned ranked below the competitors website]

Site Owner: Since you have completed the website redesign and SEO on our site we dont see any difference with rankings, can you give us an update on our website’s SEO please?
Web Company: You have to wait for Google to work out its various algorithms. It can take about 2 months before it recognises the changes and display them accordingly. [our comment: Google's Algorithms are worked out and can change daily but you do need to wait for the search bots (googlebot) to revisit your site to pickup changes, it can be 1 day or it can be a few weeks before changes are reflected in your site's ranking)

Site Owner:Your details on where we were Google wise was not the same as what we saw Google wise from our PC and laptop at home, we were still below [our main competitor]?. should we check again? is there more we can still do?
Web Company: As we have an account with Google our ranking is more accurate that yours [our comment: actually ranking does vary depending on what data center you connect to and if you are signed into Google via your account and if you have web history turned on or off but just having an account with Google doesnt mean rankings are different]

Site Owner:Spent lots of money with you to promote our website but after 3 months nothing has happened, we are actually the same place and have the same visitor numbers.
Web Company: Google has not finished indexing and displaying the site as it should yet. Still a waiting game. Once it has then I can take a look at it again. [our comment: onsite changes should be picked up within 1-2 months maximum and normally positive changes are noticed after a SEO program within 3 months)

Site Owner: Our site snippet (in Google and Bing, Yahoo) is the same despite you changing the title and description during your updates.
Web Company: There is no telling when Google will get round to indexing and displaying a site how you want it to. They have well over a trillion pages to work with every day. Most search engine companies will say 3 months minimum. [our comment: the title and description were not actually changed and pages can be re-indexed daily so its not true to say most search engine companies 'say' 3 months)

Site Owner: Really want to be ranking higher than my competitor, can you get us ranking higher than them?
Web Company Shouldn't be a problem beating that site. Just looked at the coding and it is awful. Just got to wait for Google to do its thing as it does not happen overnight unfortunately.[our comment: coding may be a ranking factor but even if coding standards are a ranking factor it will be a very very minor one)

Site Owner: Why did you say we were ranked higher than our competitor and now we are ranked 8th and they are 2nd?
Web Company: Google may have temporarily put you above [competitor's site] and then moved you down again once all their algorithms were worked out. [our comment: mmm anything is possible but this sounds like the site owner is dealing with an amateur]

Site Owner: When are we going to see the benefits of your website updates and SEO work? have you done the optimisation?
Web Company: I have done the optimisation, yes. You are on the front page for quite a few keywords. [our comment: all optimisation programs should be completed with a full report of changes made and the site in this example only ranked on the 'front page' for their company name, which isnt that impressive! )

Site Owner: Just a quick note how do we get ourselves onto the first page when people are searching  [selection of random search terms] not sure if this is something we need to do?
Web Company: I can do this for you it will be £100 per search term. [our comment: we just smiled when we saw that this was what someone said and goes to prove that in every industry there are cowboys, to quote a random figure for an unspecified bit of work is pure speculative chancing! If you want your site promoted property give us a ring and we will tell you in non-technical terms what it takes and what you can reasonably expect]

Recently we have been asked to perform a SEO project on a site and during our investigation into what work had been performed previously we found that the previous ‘SEO’ had been trying but not achieving anything in terms of ranking increases or visitor number improvements. We found that previous exchanges had taken place between a client and his previous so-called ‘seo’ that are detailed below.

The website was redesigned and put live 3 months previous to this conversation with Google caching the site a week before this exchange:

site owner question: Now that you have optimised the website can you give me your opinion on where the site now sits in the search engines now. Although it’s the summer season and its high business season, our search position hasn’t improved and our website inquiries have dropped off. Can you give me your comments please

answer: Hard to say as Google is still not displaying all the content from the new website in the search results. [our comment: erm.... it is actually] Your website was static for so long Google are not rushing to get this spidered. Nothing we can do apart from sit and wait. [our comment: yes sit and wait always a good one!] Maybe change the content on the home page? [our comment: yes why not ! or just sit and wait? ]

site owner question: I gave you a list of towns, cities, and a couple of counties that are our main target areas that I looked at that we appear on some pages well near the top and others several pages later, why is there such a discrepancy and can this be rectified

answer: I have put the towns and villages into the website, but unfortunately there is no guarantee of where you will come. Nothing can be guaranteed on Google. Even if a company says they can get you to page 1 they are lying. [our comment: really ? always?] The trouble is someone may optimise their site heavily for just one of those areas as they only need to perform with 1 search term and they will beat you every time. As stated before, once Google displays your site correctly things will change, however they still display your old text which doesn’t appear anywhere on the new site [our comment: the seo believes as the text in the site snippet isnt now on the site that it hasnt been crawled since the site redesign, the site has been crawled and re-indexed and the site snipped is from the dmoz directory]*

*To ensure your site doesn’t pickup meta data from your dmoz listing you have to include the meta data meta name=”robots” content=”NOODP”

This was sent to me by a client that was approached by a ‘SEO’ company and shows how ruthless some companies are in trying to attract website owners to pay for their services. It contains some glaring inaccuracies and attempts to charge £900  for a Google Maps listing  for the year. If you didnt know any SEO / Web site design company or indeed website owner can create a  Google Places listing for free, we include this listing as part of our SEO packages. The text also states that 70% of website searches click on a google maps listing, the latest research I read puts it closer to 15%.

SEO review

Your website is already search engine friendly and ranks very well for terms relating to your local area. The areas that we would suggest expanding to would be too include [other local areas] where there is a good volume of search traffic. What we would suggest would be a website ready package for these areas which would cost £99. This would include full key word research to find the best search terms to target in terms of traffic relating to your business as well as detailing what should be included on the website to focus on these terms. There is full phone support for 28 days included. We would then need a £100 per month SEO package to boost your website’s popularity on the internet and boost your rankings. We don’t tie you in to a long terms contract and although it would take some time to get you ranked you would only have to carry on paying as long as you are satisfied with the service that you receive.

The other option that we would suggest is a Google Maps Listing. This is an area the we specialise in and can be done without making any changes at all to your website. For the term ‘generic term in an area’ there are 19 searches every day and with the first page of results returning a map box at the very top of the page, we can get you into that listing within three months. The cost of £150 a month for these three months and then £50 a month to maintain it as long as you would like the listing to remain. With around 70% of the clickthoughs going through these listing not to mention the number of searchers that just phone straight up without visiting the website they are a prime place to get your site displayed.