Archive for the ‘Google’ Category

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.

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.

The next Google Pagerank update is slightly overdue compared with previous updates and now we are ‘guessing’ / predicting it will be on the 31st August. Page rank is an indication of the weight of the links coming to your webpage and is used as a general metric by advertisers and domain purchasers to assess the importance and value of your site. Some people dismiss the toolbar pagerank as not important and we believe there is some vanity involved with having a higher page rank and the real importance is where the site lies for its most important ‘keyword searches’  in Google (SERPS). Therefore we are saying that if you are an Electrician in Essex its more important to rank highly for search terms like ‘essex electrician’ than to have a higher page rank than your other essex electrician competitors.

We don’t focus on page rank but aren’t naive about the power of a page with high Google Pagerank, we quote it in our SEO reports and website overviews and monitor it when updates occur. When we create websites and promote them via SEO and SEM we get to have a good feel for their ‘Google Link Power’ and for a bit of fun we are going to predict the following domains that we have worked on being changed in the next update:

http://www.delicious-webdesign.com/ prediction up from 4 to 5
http://www.marquees-london.co.uk/ prediction up from 1 to 2
http://www.johns-brickwork.co.uk/ prediction up from 1 to 2
http://www.securitysystemsessex.co.uk/ prediction up from 1 to 2
http://www.jacksonco.co.uk/prediction up from 1 to 2
http://www.kellysoccasions.co.uk/ up from 1 to 2

I predict this update must come soon, been just over 3 months since the last one and they have been coming quarterly for some time now, we will be reporting our page rank increases and decreases just like we did back in April 2010

Pretty fed up of having to pick up the pieces from so called SEO experts after they make a real mess on people’s sites and then the site owner sees no increases in site position or visitors before deciding to move on. The problem is that the period of them making a mess of the site and the site owner actually realising that the site is not performing well can be months or even years.

Recently had a client that had been given a list of keywords from his previous SEO company that they were optimising for, out of a list of 12 search terms only 1 was a competitive search term that was relative to the clients website. Some of the search terms were things like ‘local builder’ and ‘<company name> services’ which are totally useless as search terms that convert searchers into clients. To top it off the only competitive search term they listed was ‘essex builder’ and told my client (by email and by a chart and by a video of them searching) that he was in position 2 on google.co.uk. After 2 minutes of verification all the search positions were made up and instead of being in position 2 they were in position 56!

Once we took over the site and migrated it to our hosting company the real nightmare begun, the code was horrible, massively bloated, terrible navigation, no SEO attempted on titles / headers / descriptions / keywords or content. Google had 5 variations of the same page indexed and two of the main pages were not even listed in Google. I could go on but it just gets worse.

Needless to say be very selective when choosing an SEO ‘expert’ as you are putting your companies future in their hands and they could indeed ruin the company if the SEO campaign is done in an incompetant manner by someone that has no idea what they are doing. Check out their previous record of SEO and ask them some questions that require some SEO thought like ‘ what do you think is going to be an SEO factor that is going to have its weighting in the search algorythms increase over the next few years’ and see if they can give you an intelligent answer. There are some questions that do not have a right and wrong answer and sometimes you have to put your  trust in someone, but best put your trust in someone that has a proven track record and has previous clients that say nice things about them,  like…….. erm us

Check this for more SEO info and how we can help your website move up in the rankings

http://www.delicious-webdesign.com/seo-package.html

The biggest growth area for the business over the last 6 months has been web copy or website content creation. I have always known and believed that you should build something useful and they will come. In the analogy above ‘building something’ is a webpage containing useful information relevant to the search and ‘they will come’ is the website visitors that have been encouraged to go to your page due to a high ranking from the big G or your other favorite search engine.

Well lets get something straight in the SEO world there is a limit to the amount of improvements you can give a site by ‘polishing’ or SEO’ing it, you need unique, relevant, easily readable and search engine friendly text indexed, therefore a phase in our SEO process is to ensure we have the correct text in place to begin the SEO process in the first place. This is where the webcopy / website text creation is generally suggested and taken up by our clients.

Recently had a client that wanted to rank highly for terms like ‘essex conservatory’ ‘loft conversions in essex’ and other building related terms, this client had spent loads of time / effort and money on website design / video / images and other SEO companies but after all the ‘stuff’ was cut out his website featured only 3 paragraphs relating to his key search terms. I have benchmarked the sites positions prior to the new content and SEO process beginning (website client http://www.johns-brickwork.co.uk)

and will update this story in 3 months to see the improvements our Webcopy and SEO process makes to his SERPs and visitor numbers.

We have recently done a massive project for webcopy for a Dive Theory site and the proof of that is that it ranks Number 1 for ‘Dive Theory Physics’ within 2 months of launch.

Very happy to get a Christmas e-card from Google saying that are giving over £12 million pounds to charity as a Christmas Gift