Search Engine Optimisation
Fast Cars and SEO
There are many things that people collect; art, horses, precious metals or rare clothing. If money were no object, I would personally probably collect cars. I love driving and am a sucker for an open road, so these vehicles would not be just bought to be closeted away in dusty halls for folk to ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ over, no they would be road ready and used regularly. I would want to drive my car and ideally would love it to be ready for that road whenever I was.
So there I am with my garage full of expensive and rare machinery, one morning I am about to hit the road and I notice that my latest acquisition has a flat. So what does one do? The car just cost me close to £30m and the idea of hooking up with the local car shed or scrap yard, does not somehow seem appropriate. A quick glance online takes me to a specialist tyre centre that will supply the correct tyres not only for my current problem, but for all of the other vehicles in my collection. There is obviously an increased cost, but it is a good idea to get the right fit first time isn’t it? After all it will be me who is flying through those corners in the dales and for peace of mind..
So what on earth is this all to do with SEO? The answer is quite simple really; there are a great many web designers who also ‘do SEO’. This is great if you just want to get from A to B. Like the car supermarkets that also ‘do tyres’, they may be able to help to a greater or lesser degree in getting you where you want to be. However if you want to be flying as soon as possible, going back to the folk who designed your website is perhaps not the greatest idea as they are busy designing sites, looking after all of their other customers new and old and monitoring all of the background details of your site such as updates etc. They can in many cases help you to design an optimised site, but keeping it optimised (i.e. stopping those tyres from going bald) is possibly left to a more dedicated team of professionals.
Sticking with our car analogy, think of having a dedicated SEO team working on keeping your website running at it’s absolute best for attracting new customers, to having a dedicated service team who will ensure that your ‘car’ is always ready to hit that open road – every hour of every day. Every page of your website, every blog, every article can receive dedicated treatment in order to reach out to more new customers, new enquiries and new connections, leaving you to run your business. Yes there will be an additional expense, but many of us do not buy a car just because we want to stand and look at it once a day.
So you have built your website and it is all you dreamed about. It has everything that you wanted plus more flourishes that the designer added to make it look the absolute bomb. When you hit that launch button, you will be competing with over a billion other sites – some of whom will be offering exactly the same as you. You want to stand out from the crowd – you need a dedicated mechanic working with/for you. Debayne is proud and pleased to be working alongside Wildshark SEO, contact us today to see how they can help you with your vehicle, we will have you flying along in no time! Debayne Web Design – Weaving the Web your Way.
6 Team Elements For A Winning Web Site
With so many websites being created and launched daily (tens of thousands on the WordPress platform alone) how do we make ours the one that stands out from the crowd or at least give ourselves an edge over some of the competition? Let’s talk about teamwork. There are very few instances where one person can effectively do everything to make a site and keep it in the public eye, let’s break it down:
- Obviously a competent Web Designer. Avoid friends and family who might ‘dabble’ in web sites, this is your livelihood you are talking about so let’s be serious. Also avoid free sites for these reasons. Shop around on price, but remember that sometimes in life we must pay a little more in order to get a lot better return. Finally make sure that you can talk to this person, they have to take the time to understand a little about your business, if they just cut and paste, walk away.
- Close on the heels of this is good content. If you are not sure that your GCSE English is good enough to wow your prospects, talk to your designer or gain advice from a Copywriter. A good copywriter can put your words and emotions into engaging text, text that will keep the interest of visitors to the site and aid with the sales message.
- A picture says a thousand words, so it is worth mentioning pictures on websites and the importance of securing professional photography. If you are thinking ‘well my phone has a camera’, are you really doing justice to your business? Think if you will on what the largest auction site in the world says – pictures sell!
- An SEO Specialist – whilst many designers also ‘do SEO’, it must be pointed out that if you are interested in gaining and keeping a good position on the search engines, it is worth talking to someone who can dedicate more time to doing just that.
- A Social Media Specialist – again many web designers can also wear this hat, but ideally this should be someone who will work closely with you once the site is up and running and preferably one that understands (or is willing to take the time to understand) your business message.
- The final and most important member of the team by far is YOU. In order to have a winning web presence you must be able to dedicate at least a portion of your working week to working with the other members of your team. Your web designer will need answers fast in order to get you up and running and make any changes to the site; your copywriter will have to sit down with you occasionally to get a better grasp of your message and goals moving forwards. The SEO specialist will want to know what portion of the market you want to focus on and what keywords and phrases you want to be found with and of course the social media specialist will want to know what you are focussing on that week/month of social media in order to craft the right message.
A website is not just a flyer for your business but an integral part of it, a part that should be growing with you as you grow and bringing in those all important enquiries. You will find that the more effort that you and your team put in, the more rewards it can bring to your business. We are lucky in being able to work closely with our many clients and trusted partners so that we can offer recommendations to who five of your team members could be. However, none of us can work without that sixth vital member YOU. Are you ready to team up? Give us a call today and let’s start Weaving the Web your Way. Pete from Debayne.
Content is STILL King
For many years, we have been advising our customers about the importance of good content on a website and the need to be more than just a collection of keywords and back-links. We have educated them about the disadvantages of ‘keyword stuffing’ – which is trying to put every word that may be searched for about your industry into a list on your pages. Also we have told them about those who will prey on website owners, promising top of page one on Google for often exorbitant sums of money – when not even Google themselves can or will promise this.
You can only imagine our joy when we come across an article or statements directly from search eng
ine companies that not only prove that we know what we are saying and doing for our customers, but also holds up a magnifying glass to those who would happily take your hard earned money with promises of high ranking, when all that is really needed in many cases is a little ingenuity and research. Here is a link to the article in question: http://searchengineland.com/google-changes-ranking-advice-says-build-quality-sites-not-links-163931
Don’t misunderstand us here, we know several businesses who will genuinely help you with Search Engine Optimisation based on the content of your site. These are the businesses worth listening to, the ones who understand the importance of what we have been telling you for years – content is king and without well thought out and well produced website content, you will not attain the rankings on Google or for that matter other search engines, that you seek.
So let me say again, with Google’s backing, that unless you concentrate on making your site interesting, useful and informative to customers and potential customers, no amount of SEO will give you those top rankings that you are in need of to take your site from ‘just another’ to ‘market leader’. From Googles Webmaster Tools here is a direct quote: “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by creating high-quality sites that users will want to use and share. “
So your mission this week is to take a look at your site as a customer might. Better still, ask one of your friends to do this for you and give you feedback. Will your website be swimming with the penguins or sink like a stone? Also keep an eye out for our new Website MOT service which will be coming out in the very near future and is aimed specifically at you attaining and keeping a site that is not only secure and updated, but one that others will want to return to and share with their friends and other businesses.
Not another email about SEO!
With our inboxes and spam folders filling up with constant offers to ‘Help’ us with our SEO – it feels time that we tackle this subject in a little more depth and demystify it once and for all. When all is said and done many of the companies offering this service are relying on you NOT wanting to know about it – and therefore entrusting them and often very large sums of money – to ‘sort it out’ for you.
So let me keep this simple. The first thing that one should realise about SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is that it is not the answer to why your site isn’t getting the hits – or more precisely it is not the ONLY answer. A good website has to have certain key elements that we have covered before – Updated regularly – Social media – Ease of use – Well laid out – Interesting and/or useful data for your customers etc. Concentrating on the SEO is like concentrating on a car’s wheels they are but a part of the car – yes they are made to get you places but if the engine is broken they will do nothing.
Only once we have tackled all the elements of good website design can we tackle optimising it to be found (hopefully) in a prominent place on the search engines. Notice that I say hopefully here there is a reason for this – the way in which search engines ‘decide’ which site is to be number one (paid advertising aside) changes often – in order that those who think they know how to play the system are often penalised for doing so. Not too long ago for example you could use what is known as ‘keyword stuffing’ – including every term or phrase used in your industry either visibly at the base of a page or invisibly hidden in the code. This use will now get your site booted to the back of the list!
So let us look at an example of good and bad SEO content on a website. I will use a plumber for this as they are often very territorial and ‘work an area’. So Monday morning the local plumber puts a new update on the site about how he has installed a new boiler – it might read like this: This weekend we replaced an old boiler with a new one. We left the site clean and tidy and the customer was very happy. You maybe have one good phrase in there for SEO – old boiler. This may be a term that people will put into a search engine to find help with. But this simple piece of text could have been further enhanced like this: As the LOCAL RELIABLE PLUMBER in X-TOWN – and as we are AVAILABLE 24 HOURS a day – we spent this weekend replacing an OLD INEFFICIENT BOILER with a new ENERGY EFFICIENT one from X-COMPANY. To see how HAPPY our CUSTOMER is have a look at our TESTIMONIALS page. All of a sudden we have sixteen words that may be searched for via a search engine. This is not all that is done during the process – but it is a large part of it.
So if your website has very little text (or content as we in the trade call it) or your videos and photographs are not appropriately tagged (i.e. pic_1a) then the chances are that no matter how successful you are at what you do – you will still not be ranking very highly on the search engines. Here at Debayne Web Design we have a more holistic view – we understand the various elements that make a successful site and will help you to keep these updated and current. Yes you can pay a fortune every month for someone to just SEO your site – or you could have a look at our monthly maintenance which starts from as little as £21 and get so much more! So if you want to get the ranking and your site to have its day – Talk to Peter at Debayne Weaving the Web your Way.
