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
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

The most important area of your site for search engine optimisation is the title. Your primary key phrase should ALWAYS be the first few words. i.e. “Essex electrician” or “chocolate fountain hire”. Instead a lot of websites  put their company name, ‘home page’ or ‘welcome to our site’ as the page title. This is a complete waste as anyone who knows your company name will simply type in your web address and ‘home page’ and ‘welcome’ aren’t really the searches you are targeting.

As your company name is probably unique and it appears somewhere in your site that is good enough to rank for it if its used to search for you. If a potential client does not know your company name, nobody in a million years is ever going to type it in so you will have completely wasted your best opportunity to be ranked for your key search term.

We specialise in search engine optimisation, generating high rankings in Google, Bing and the Bing search engines for your websites, for when a potential customer or client searches for the products / services that they require a  business to provides.

We have found that many web designers specialise in building websites with no thought to search engine optimisation and find that these two should go hand in hand. We are now offering our services to new clients who didnt get their website created and designed by us, with our new SEO package, this package  will give your poorly performing website a massive kick and get it working for you. We will provide you with full reports to tell you all you need to know about how we go about fully optimising your website.

If you have a website created by another agency and that website hasnt been bring in any business to you and not delivering the visitors to the actual site then this program is for you. As your website has not been created in a ‘search engine friendly’ way then this additional business expense will end up being the best money you have spent, dont take our word for it though look at our previous client comments.

This project, our search engine optimisation project, currently costs between £750 – £900 (August 2010 prices) depending on the size of your website, the complexity of it and how much work is needed to bring it up to speed to get it ranking highly, we also take into account what you want to achieve and what keywords you want your site to rank for before creating a project plan and coming to a final price, we have also found that many clients after having their website built go on to pay thousands of pounds a year to other so called SEO companies to optimise their website but see no work completed or improvement in their rankings and visitor numbers. If this sounds familar then pick up the phone  and talk to james today 07743 853976, alternatively email us.

Dont get this SEO program confused with ‘paid for results’ which is  Google / Bing and Yahoo’s ‘pay per click’ advertising, we can help our clients promote their business with a PPC Program but we believe the SEO program is the best value in the long term for your business and website, why pay thousands of pounds a year to generate paid results when these do not effect your organic (free listing results at Google, Bing and Yahoo) when our SEO Package will provide everything you need for a set fee.

We ensure your website is set up correctly for search engines to return clients to key areas on the website
We setup your websites external back linking and article submissions, ensuring online exposure is always growing naturally
We implement measuring tools for your website to give you clear and consise online results

Our expertise is in optimising search engine results. Put simply, we understand the functionality of search engines and are able to optimise your website to ensure the best result (without having to pay someone for temporary PPC results) to ensure your investment in an online presence translates to increased sales for your business. With many years of online search experience, we can provide your business the right information to ensure you achieve the best results.

Commonly for business brochure websites, that are brand new websites as opposed to redesigns, we get asked what to expect in terms of performance / business inquiries, here is a recent reply I gave to a client who asked me how his website is doing compared with other new launched websites.

I would say the site is doing better than expected seeing its brand new, the search engines know you are new and don’t take much notice of you to start with normally. Your rankings are not ‘firm’ to begin with normally and you can be bounced all over the place in the first months.

Needless to say you are doing the right thing by using PPC advertising and that is bringing you quite a number of valuable visitors in the last 30 days. New sites simply take time to get ‘noticed’ and ranked accordingly but rest assured cream always rises to the top.

Check this recent post I made to show how our websites move up the search engines
http://www.delicious-webdesign.com/blog/search-engine-optimisation/161

just noticed that you are number 11 for a competitive term already, after the website was launched only 3 months ago, this is a national / UK wide search term and a good sign of things to come.

The website is going to be around for a long time and earn you lots of business but you are up against loads of established websites / companies so its going to be slow to start with, here are some tips you can follow to improve your site and its search engine ranking:

1, keep posting on your blog.
2, ask friends / contact that have websites to get a link to your site.
3, post on more forums and have your website as your ‘signature’ and try to mention your site if possible.
4, get testimonials from clients and give them to us to regularly update your site.
5, Send us new photos for your photo galleries

When a client comes to us to get their website moved up the rankings in the search engines we really do make a difference with our customised SEO projects. We are currently charging our clients between £750 and £900 to complete a full 3 month project on their websites and the results of some of our most impressive results is below:

Client: watercooled-pcs.co.uk
Search Term: watercooled pcs
Rankings: Bing 1st, Google 1st, Yahoo 1st

Client: arrowvintagecars.co.uk
Best Search Term: wedding cars essex
Rankings: Google 1st, Yahoo 1st, Bing 2nd

Client: johns-brickwork.co.uk
Best Search Term: Essex Builder
Rankings: Google 1st, Yahoo 9th, Bing 4th

Client: idc-guide.com
Best Search Term: padi idc
Rankings: Yahoo 1st, Bing 7th

Search Term: padi dive theory
Rankings: Yahoo 1st, Bing 5th, Google 4th

Client: reactive-electrical.co.uk
Search Term: essex electrician
Rankings: Bing 2th, Google 2nd

These rankings were taken on 25th June 2010 at 1600

We aim to build long term business relationships with our clients and we are never happier when existing website and SEO clients ask us our opinion or advice about their websites and the promotion of their websites. The reason we get asked is that we become a trusted and valuable business associate having contributed in a big way to their business by giving them a website, re-designing and updating their existing site or promoting (via search engine optimisation SEO or search engine marketing SEM) their site.

A good example of that business relationship is shown below in iterations of a company website (An Essex Electrician company) that was actually one of our first ever clients and one that has stayed with us and had a website re-design, SEO program, logo design and a PPC campaign.

The result of the work we have performed on the site is shown by version 3 of the site below (launched 31st May 2010) that shows a site that dedicates one page to all the main services, is user friendly and search engine friendly in design.

Version 1 Pre 2006
We took over the website from another company
http://www.reactive-electrical.co.uk/index2.htm

Version 2 2006-2010
A budget redesign of original website, site highlights main services and is XHTML compliant
http://www.reactive-electrical.co.uk/index1.html

Version 3 2010 onwards
Result of full redesign / update and content (webcopy) update that was recommended after the SEO program
http://www.reactive-electrical.co.uk

So you have now got a website but it doesn’t bring in as much business as you imagined? Some website business sectors are harder to break into and some are harder to convert site visitors to clients but in general you can give your website a ‘leg-up’ on the competition by performing a few simple things. Its no good having a brilliant looking website if nobody visits the site and people cant even find it using search engines, its like having a great shop but its not on the high street and not in any shopping guides. Your website needs to stand out to potential customers. Over 82% of people use one or more search engines (Google, Bing or Yahoo) to find what they are looking for. Your site will need to rank higher for meaningful and competitive search terms than your competitors, otherwise they will steal the business from under your nose, talk to us about how we can improve your chances of having a website that works, read our seo package guide

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.

previous wrote about how in demand our webcopy services are, this promoted me to add another page on the site to explain a bit more about the benefits of good webcopy on your website and how it shouldnt be overlooked.
At Delicious Webdesign we dont want to be an Award winning website design company at the expense of the other aspects of a website, we go for the all-around or holistic approach to website design whereby we ensure the website is geared towards the goal of the website owner which is normally making them money. We ensure that a website looks great, works perfectly and is updated with the latest industry standards (W3C Compliance for xhtml and css code) as well as ensuring that the site is optimised (SEO) and a big part of the SEO process is ensuring the website text is unique, relevant and search engine friendly.

Take a look at our page dedicated to the benefits of having your website copy done professionally

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